Detail from Marisa Adesman, Red in Tooth and Claw, Oil on paper, 22 x 30 inches (paper size); 13 11/16 x 22 1/2 inches (image size)
This group exhibition brings together eighteen contemporary artists in response to Salvador Dalí’s 1944 masterpiece from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Painted during Dalí’s American exile, the work merges meticulous realism with dreamlike fracture, desire, and myth. At Main Projects, artists including Julie Curtiss, Katherine Bradford, Arghavan Khosravi, Umar Rashid, Meghann Stephenson, and Jeremy Olson extend these themes into the present, creating newly conceived works that stage bodies, landscapes, and symbols as sites of instability and transformation. Together, the exhibition reanimates surrealism’s urgency for today, positioning Richmond as a stage for dialogue between a canonical painting and its twenty-first century echoes.