Platform Dalí Extends the Artist’s Legacy Through Art and Science

Around a decade after James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the groundbreaking double-helix structure of DNA, Watson tracked down Salvador Dalí at his hotel in New York. The scientist sent the artist a note inviting him to lunch. It read: “The second-most-intelligent person in the world wants to meet the most intelligent.”

The encounter neatly illustrates Dalí’s unusual standing beyond the art world. Today, that unlikely conversation between art and science finds a contemporary echo in Platform Dalí, a new programme launched by the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí. 

Bringing together two 18-month fellows and five year-long artist residencies, the initiative pairs artists with scientists working at the forefront of research. The results of its first edition, titled What is Real?, are currently presented in Barcelona, running through 23 July.

The programme is rooted in a lesser-known aspect of Dalí’s career. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the artist developed a fascination with mathematics, physics and molecular biology, seeing scientific discovery not as a challenge to spirituality but as another route towards understanding existence. His so-called “nuclear mysticism” sought to reconcile the material world with metaphysical questions in the wake of the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the denouement of the Second World War. 

Watson and Dalí’s own dialogue would prove contentious: whereas Watson argued that the discovery of the double helix undermined the existence of God, Dalí insisted it pointed in precisely the opposite direction.

Platform Dalí builds partnerships with leading research institutions in an effort to continue that line of scientific inquiry while opening it up to contemporary perspectives. Its director, Monica Bello, argues that this approach is particularly important at a time when scientific and technological advances increasingly shape everyday life. Artists, she says, are uniquely placed to “engage in something factual through experience”.

Tania Candiani, HUM, 2025 (installation view, Platform Dalí, What is real?, 2026, launch event). Courtesy Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

Bello is well placed to lead the initiative. Before joining Platform Dalí, she was Head of Arts at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, where she became one of the leading figures working at the intersection of art and science. Her appointment lends considerable credibility within the contemporary art world to a programme centred on an artist whose legacy remains deeply contested – Dalí has long attracted criticism for his apparent misogynistic attitude and well-documented sympathies towards fascism.

“There are many ways of reading Dalí,” Bello acknowledges. “There was the dark side of Dalí: his links to fascism, his pop status in Spain. But he also had positive sensibilities: his performativity, his queerness, his fashion, his party-going and his sensitivity towards the beginning and the end of life.” Prior to taking the job, she says: “I was not Dalinian, but Dalí has allowed me – in conversation with artists and scientists – to understand that there are also possibilities in the twentieth century’s skeletons in the closet.”

The programme becomes most convincing when artists challenge Dalí’s own assumptions rather than simply inheriting them. During a panel discussion marking the launch, one of the artists in residence, George Mahashe, suggested the idea that reality can be understood solely through quantifiable scientific knowledge is a narrow one, citing the Indigenous Knowledge System of his native South African Balobedu people as an equally valid way of understanding the world. His work embodies the programme at its best, expanding beyond Dalí’s narrower worldview to demonstrate how spirituality and science can coexist across different systems of knowledge.

Mahashe undertook his residency at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE) in Barcelona, working alongside researchers specialising in particle physics, quantum computing, dark matter and gravitational waves. “I didn’t realise how much overlap of language there is in science and the humanities,” he tells me. “Entanglements, relationality… concepts which can seem so mathematical – in the arts we have equivalent vocabularies that describe the same phenomena.” His new research centres on cosmology, drawing parallels between astronomical observation and local divination practices. He describes the exoplanet hunters (astronomers searching for planets beyond our own solar system) he worked alongside during the residency, and the similarities between their methods and the way the Balobedu matriarchal Rain Queens interpret clouds and rainfall.

Mahashe is equally eloquent when reflecting on Dalí’s complicated legacy. “Artists are fundamentally researchers,” he says. “We are people that have to grapple with the messy and beautiful reality we are brought into, and there is nothing we can do to clean it up. For me, the context has reminded me of what it’s like to be an artist in an age where art has become way too professionalised.”

Platform Dalí, What is Real?, 2026, launch event. Courtesy Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí

Other work presented as part of the launch is of varying effectiveness, raising questions as to what extent these ‘dialogues’ can put into practice what they claim to facilitate. Suzanne Treister’s AI renderings of quasi-religious ‘institutes’ of ‘Mystical Earth Science’ – an interdisciplinary fusion of cybernetics, systems theory, the Gaia hypothesis, complexity theory and Earth System Science – feels hollow, particularly since it uses the environmentally damaging technology of artificial intelligence infrastructure to speculate future utopias. Tania Candiani’s HUM is more successful: it is an audio-visual essay investigating geometric connections of the trumpet shape, across ancient instruments, black holes and scientific experiments at CERN and projected onto the ceiling of Barcelona’s La Llotja de Mar.

The programme also raises a broader question: is Platform Dalí an attempt by the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí to reposition the artist’s legacy for contemporary audiences? Established by Dalí himself in 1983, the foundation is financially independent, allowing it to do far more than preserve his estate. Last year it generated around €19 million in revenue through ticket sales, merchandising and copyright, with €2.2 million reinvested in acquisitions for the Dalí Theatre-Museum’s collection. Alongside the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres and the Salvador Dalí House-Museum in Portlligat, the foundation has now added an opulent headquarters for Platform Dalí in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.

Platform Dalí’s next resident is the Anglo-Algerian conceptual artist Lydia Ourahmane, whose recent exhibition 5 Works was presented at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation during the Venice Biennale. She will undertake research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Barcelona beginning this autumn, exploring the literal and metaphorical weight of memory. An international open call for artists to join the programme's 2027 residencies is already underway.

Whether Platform Dalí ultimately succeeds will depend less on rehabilitating Dalí than on allowing contemporary artists to interrogate and complicate his legacy.