Authentication of sculpture and three-dimensional work

Authentication of sculpture and three-dimensional work Fundació Gala - Salvador Dalí

The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí will set up a specialist committee that will assume responsibility for assessing, cataloguing and passing judgment on any sculpture and three-dimensional object that may be claimed to be the work of Salvador Dalí.

In order to authenticate the work and provide it with an expertization certificate, its authorship must first be certified. This process will entail the following steps, depending on the characteristics of the work:

  1. Identify and authenticate Dalí's authorship of the work, if possible by means of the certificate of authenticity issued for the work by the artist himself
  2. Establish the provenance of the work
  3. Certify Dalí's connection with the work in the form of documentation (contracts, bon à tirer, correspondence, photographs, bibliography, etc)

Once Dalí's authorship has been determined, the next step is to assess and catalogue the work according to the criteria set out above in the section entitled Artistic criteria of the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in relation to sculpture. Every work that meets all of the conditions applying to each section will be issued with an expertization certificate endorsing its condition and characteristics as one of the following:

  • Unique Original Work by Salvador Dalí
  • Original Work by Salvador Dalí
  • Posthumous Original Work by Salvador Dalí
  • Multiple Work by Salvador Dalí

Expertization certificates will only be issued for original works by Salvador Dalí and ​​for multiple works made prior to 23 January 1989. This being so, no piece made under a reproduction licence will be eligible for this type of accreditation, on the grounds that this is not an artwork as such but a mere reproduction, as established in the section entitled Reproduction of a Work by Salvador Dalí authorized by licence.