Salvador by Sara Kissing
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Acrylic, 24-Karat Gold Leaf, Markers, Epoxy Resin
Dimensions: 48 x 60 in
Year: 2025
Price: $9900.00 USD
Status: available
This mixed-media portrait of Salvador Dalí is more than a likeness—it is a visual biography. Before creating the work, I researched Dalí’s life, art, obsessions, eccentricities, creative philosophy, and the symbols that repeatedly appeared throughout his career. I then embedded those discoveries into the painting through handwritten words, imagery, photographs, typography, symbols, and layers of 24-karat gold leaf. Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, in 1904, Dalí became one of the most recognizable and provocative figures of the Surrealist movement. His full name—Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech—is incorporated into the composition, transforming his identity itself into part of the artwork. Words such as SURREAL, METAMORPHOSIS, ILLUSION, REBIRTH, CREATIVITY, and DISTORTION reference the ideas at the heart of Dalí’s work: transforming reality, challenging perception, and turning familiar objects into something strange, dreamlike, and psychologically charged. His famous Paranoiac-Critical Method, also written into the painting, refers to Dalí’s technique of encouraging irrational associations and multiple interpretations—allowing the viewer to see beyond ordinary reality and discover different images and meanings within a single composition. References to Dalí’s celebrated artworks are woven throughout the piece. The Persistence of Memory appears through imagery associated with his iconic melting clocks, while Metamorphosis speaks to his fascination with transformation and shifting perception. The egg, another recurring element, references a symbol Dalí repeatedly used to represent birth, creation, and transformation. But the painting also explores the complicated man behind the masterpieces. Dalí was famous for his eccentric and theatrical behavior and openly explored his fears, obsessions, dreams, paranoia, sexuality, and neuroses. His fascination with Freud and psychoanalysis became intertwined with his creative process. Rather than separating these psychological complexities from his art, Dalí frequently turned them into artistic material. Even the unexpected Chupa Chups reference belongs to his story. In 1969, Dalí designed the famous flower-shaped Chupa Chups logo—an extraordinary example of his creativity crossing from fine art into popular and commercial culture. Photographic fragments, crowns, handwritten observations, black marks, turquoise typography, and luminous 24-karat gold leaf collide throughout the composition, creating a deliberately layered and chaotic visual world that reflects Dalí himself: genius and spectacle, beauty and disturbance, reality and dream. At the center, Dalí looks directly at the viewer, surrounded by the ideas, masterpieces, contradictions, and obsessions that made him unmistakably himself. This painting is my interpretation of Salvador Dalí not simply as a famous artist, but as a mind—brilliant, theatrical, obsessive, provocative, and endlessly surreal.
Why collect this work?
A frontal likeness becomes a contested reading surface: Dalí remains identifiable, while oversized names, notes, crowns and photographs repeatedly interrupt recognition.
- In her statement, Kissing describes a research-led practice in which typography relates to the depicted subject. Here, that approach makes Dalí’s public identity appear assembled from names, images and art-historical references.
- The face and hands establish a central silhouette, but turquoise lettering crosses the head and torso while smaller marks crowd the surrounding field. Looking alternates between reading fragments and reconstructing the figure beneath them.
- The catalogue documents acrylic, markers, 24-karat gold leaf and epoxy resin. Their combination supports abrupt transitions among painted likeness, handwritten notation, collage-like imagery and reflective accents, though the photograph cannot establish exact surface effects.
- As a contemporary portrait of an already mediated celebrity, the work tests whether biographical facts and familiar motifs clarify Dalí or further conceal him behind the image of “Dalí.”
About the Artist
Sara Kissing
Sara Kissing is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Naples, US.
Nationality: German
I create visual stories.
