Did you know that there is a bronze sculpture, Woman Aflame by Salvador Dali on display at the Landmark in Central? It located just inside the Queens Road Central entrance, next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel next door.
In case you find it difficult to read the text in the photograph of the plaque accompanying the sculpture, this is what it says:
"The ends of my moustache are radar aerials with which I feel everything that happens in the world around me and that people think throughout the day". Quotes such as this give us all an insight to the mind of this great and fanatical artist.
This sculpture of a woman with her skirt in flames and a chest of drawers down her front was adapted from Dali's famous 1937 painting "Burning Giraffe".
This painting drew upon Dali's premonition of an apocalyptic war. Here the imagery of a woman with drawers recurred in Dali's works and alludes to his obsession with the mysteries of female sexuality. Dali was influenced by Sigmund Freud's work on the interpretation of dreams and the hidden sexual meanings of dream images. Dali was of the view that the human body is full of secret drawers that only the psychoanalysis is capable of opening.
Salvador Dali was a prolific Spanish artist known probably more for his paintings than his sculptures. In fact, as it states on the sign, this sculpture is based on one of his paintings, the Burning Giraffe:
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| (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Giraffe) |
One of Salvador Dali's best known is perhaps the 1931 painting "The Persistence of Memory":
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| (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD) |
Recognise the melting clocks?
