GIACOMETTI – DALI: Gardens of dreams

The first exhibition devoted to the Surrealist cooperation between Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti. At its centre is the construction of a large project that was designed for a garden but never realized.

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The project for a square began in 1929, when Giacometti designed the first of three figures for the de Noailles’ villa in Hyères. He also conceived a set of geometrical figures on a plateau, and from this the actual ‘Projet pour une place’ started to take shape. In his notebooks, the artist drew five elements that evoke myriad associations in the viewer’s mind. As if in a dream, the objects – a cone, a disc, a snake, a stele and a hemisphere – seem merely to hint at an actual function. Their forms oscillate between tangible and abstract, naturally organic and artificially constructed: objects with a character of their own that suddenly form a space in which visitors can immediately rediscover themselves. Dalí’s idea was to embed these approximately human-sized elements in a biomorphic garden landscape, as his sketch ‘Projet pour les Noailles’ (1932/33) reveals. Covering a surface area the size of a pavilion (200 x 317 x 225 cm), the installation was to be located in the walled-off garden at the modernist Villa Noailles in Hyères. It was a collaborative work based on a shared mindset.