The Visible Woman 

With her sharp gaze and excellent intuition, Gala immediately perceived in Dalí the great artist he could become and clearly saw the possibility of consummating her own myth. Hence, she did not hesitate to abandon everything – her husband, her daughter, a comfortable life in Paris – to devote herself body and soul to furthering the promising artist’s career and instilling in him the self-confidence he needed to become the renewer of the Surrealist movement and one of its foremost exponents. The artist, in return, made her the protagonist and recipient par excellence of his finest works.

The journey through Dalí’s creative output projects an ever-changing, elusive image of Gala. In an endless game of masks, Gala is many Galas: she is Gradiva, the mysterious heroine of W. Jensen’s novel who strides forward, pointing the way; she is the Sphinx who, under her skin, guards Dalí’s secret; the object of desire, the eternal back, the serene perfection of Renaissance architecture, the Atomic Leda, the Madonna of Portlligat, a fortress… But all these masks are nothing more than a mirage, a trompe-l’œil. The visible woman, mythologised and sacralised, conceals the real woman, of flesh and blood, who works tirelessly on her most ambitious project: she wants to go down in history as a legend.