The Space Elephant embodies the Dalinian symbol that was born in 1946 when the artist painted one of his most famous pictures ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’. Dalí created the image of an elephant in the Egyptian desert carrying an obelisk, a symbol of the presence and progress of technology in the modern world. Four elephants stand on spider like legs of desire, and offer art, beauty, power, pleasure and knowledge.
For this sculpture, based on the elephants in the painting, Dalí maintains the almost invisible spindle like legs emphasizing the contrast between robustness and fragility, and contrasting the idea of weightlessness with structure. This fantastically surreal creature, moving through space towards the heavens, symbolizes a flight of fantasy to a mesmerizing and surrealistic universe.
