Dalí’s Freudian Universe

The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum will host an exhibition from 20 October 2026 to 24 January 2027, which is curated by Jaime Brihuega and seeks to shed new light on the diverse and prolific work of Salvador Dalí.

The link between Salvador Dalí’s work and the writings of Sigmund Freud is one of the essential pillars of his visual poetics. The circumstances that shaped the childhood and teenage years of the painter from Figueres fostered the emergence of this relationship, which  transformed into an obsession over time and culminated in them meeting in 1938, when Freud was exiled in London.

Dalí got hold of translations of Sigmund Freud’s work in the early 1920s, during his stay at the Students’ Residence in Madrid. From 1926 onwards, his artistic production was gradually linked to Surrealist poetics, which were highly influenced by the thoughts of the doctor from Vienna.  In this context, Dalí made a decisive contribution through the development of his “paranoiac-critical method”, derived from his reading of Freudian texts. After meeting Freud in London, the presence of these theoretical elements was prominent in his subsequent mystical-nuclear phase.

The exhibition is divided into seven sections organised chronologically and associated with key moments in the artist’s life. Each section brings together works by Dalí related to Freudian thought and is rounded off with paintings and drawings by leading artists and figures, such as Jean Arp, Arnold Böcklin, Sigmund Freud, Max Ernst, Jean-François Millet, Pablo Picasso, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Julio Romero de Torres, Gino Severini and Yves Tanguy, among others.

Image Credit:

• Salvador Dalí. The Weaning of Furniture Nutrition, 1934. Oil on panel, 17.7 x 24.1 cm. The Dalí Museum Collection, St. Petersburg, Florida (USA); Donation by A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation / VEGAP, Madrid