Exhibition brings Salvador Dalí sculptures to Cork

They’ll probably remember it too. Because they don’t fit in buildings, massive sculptures are displayed outdoors.

They’re seen by many, including those who’d never go into a gallery and may not consider themselves interested in art.

Big sculptures invite strong opinions, informed and otherwise, and generate conversations that might not otherwise happen. There’s great pleasure in giving out about art.

There’s plenty to invite debate at Art and Soul, an exhibition of sculpture by Gormley’s that runs at Castlemartyr Resort in Cork until June 23. It’s a free event (11am to 7pm each day) and there are guided tours (12pm, 2pm, 4pm), which are also free, but you have to book on the hotel’s website.

There are 200 indoor artworks, but the main attraction is 100 large-scale sculptures exhibited within the grounds. Surprisingly, 95pc of these outdoor sculptures will probably end up in private ownership.

“People put them in their gardens,” Oliver Gormley says. “They see a sculpture at one of these shows and they fall in love with it.”

Since work on this scale costs between €100,000 and €150,000, purchases are relatively rare.

“We’ll have 15,000 people here over the four weeks of the show. If one person in every 500 buys a piece of art, it will pay for the show.”

Going on similar shows in the recent past, around 70pc of the large sculptures will stay in Ireland.

“We’ve just sold a two-metre bear by Patrick O’Reilly to someone who lives in the Wicklow Mountains,” Gormley says.

“And someone else just came in and bought a giant dog by the same artist for €37,000.”

Some Irish people do have that kind of money and it only takes a few of them to float a big exhibition. Other pieces go overseas.

“A couple of years ago, a very unassuming man came up to me at a show. He said he wanted to become the biggest collector of Patrick O’Reilly in America. He has 35 pieces of his sculpture now.”

Gormley has just taken a call from a woman he knows in Dublin. She’s coming down on the train to see the Salvador Dalí sculptures. Will she buy one? “Not a bit of it!” he says, and laughs. “But someone else will.”

There are 10 Salvador Dalí sculptures in the show. The biggest and boldest of these — Dance of Time II — is a humongous version of his melting clocks. It’s 1.5 metres tall and costs €1.125m.

“Someone will want that for their garden,” Gormley says. The other nine Dalí sculptures are smaller and displayed indoors (€12,000 to €33,600). Three of them are melting clocks.

Dalí revisited this theme many times throughout his long career, firstly and most famously in the painting The Persistence of Memory (1931). It was created using what Dalí called his “paranoid-critical method”, which sounds a lot like self-induced psychosis.

Looking at Dalí’s artwork isn’t always a comfortable experience — it can feel a tad too close to someone’s mental illness — but there’s no denying its energy and presence.

There are different perspectives on their meaning. Some say the melting clocks are a metaphor for time, but Dalí maintained they looked like melting cheese.

He compared them to the ripe Camembert he’d eaten after dinner. It may have given him strange dreams. By 1979, when the Dance of Time series was conceived, the melting clocks were no longer disquieting. They simply looked iconic.

Salvador Dalí died in 1989, but his sculptures are still in production. This dates back to an agreement he made with Benjamin Levi, art dealer and collector, in the 1960s.

Levi encouraged Dalí to make three-dimensional work and agreed to produce the sculptures in limited edition. The large pieces — like the one in Castlemartyr — were cast in numbered editions of eight and the smaller works in editions of 350.

This explains how a long dead artist can produce ‘new’ work. It’s the fulfillment of a contract made when he was alive.

It’s a heavily regulated industry. Dalí sculptures have been faked before, so authentication is important. This one’s certified by Nicolas Descharnes, a well-known expert who authorises Dalí artworks for Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

The sculptures are cast in the Perseo Foundry in Switzerland and displayed around the world.

Dance of Time II has been to Singapore, Paris, Beijing, New York, London, Amsterdam, Florence and Munich. Now it’s in Cork.

​Eleanor visited Art and Soul at Castlemartyr as a guest of Gormley’s and Castlemartyr Resort. See gormleys.ie and castlemartyrresort.ie.