Dance of Time III (Museum Edition)

This iconic sculpture is the third in a series of three works cast in the same year that feature the classic iconoclastic Dalinian symbol of time, and echo the artist’s seminal 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory in which the famous melted watch first appears. Dalí became obsessed with the flow of time and through-out his oeuvre he portrays the clock as a soft object with no structural integrity: a type of symbolism he reserved for those objects he loathed. “The mechanical object was to become my worst enemy, and as for watches, they would have to be soft, or not be at all!”

Dalí brings to this sculpture a level dynamism where the distorted clock appears to be literally “dancing”. Unrestrained by the rigid laws of a watch, time, for Dalí, moves to the rhythm of a perpetual dance, speeding up, slowly down, stretching out, liquefying. The clocks illustrate an important theme in Dalí’s art; the contrast between the hard and the soft, a central preoccupation of the artist.

Many critics have suggested Dali’s preoccupation with the motif related to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, a ground-breaking concept exploring the relationship between space and time and which appeared around the same time as clocks first started appearing in the Spaniards work.

These sculptures are produced in editions of 350, are created using the lost wax process, and cast at the Perseo Mendrisio Foundry in Switzerland. Dance of Time III was based on the original gouache painting produced in 1979 for the purpose.