The God of the Bay of Roses
October 16 – December 18, 2025
Salvador Dalí’s The God of the Bay of Roses (1944) occupies a singular place in the artist’s career. Painted during his American exile, the work fuses dream logic with the precision of old-master technique. At its center, a bifurcated figure bearing the face of his wife Gala rises from a fractured pedestal, encircled by spectral celebrants. Dalí described such visions as “hand-painted dream photographs” — meticulous renderings of the irrational, where fears, fantasies, and devotion converge. Now in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the painting stands as one of Dalí’s most enigmatic allegories.
At Main Projects, The God of the Bay of Roses becomes the fulcrum for new work by eighteen contemporary artists who take up its fractures, voids, and suspended bodies as prompts for their own explorations of desire, instability, and myth.
Arghavan Khosravi reframes Dalí’s exposed figure through a female lens, doubling and clothing her subjects within the ornamental geometries of Persian miniature. In Through the Hourglass, absence becomes threshold, and the void in Gala’s torso opens onto a scene of quiet transformation. Umar Rashid turns critique into spectacle: his remix recasts Dalí as a gilded bull, flanked and destabilized by chrome Amazons who dismantle patriarchal mythologies of power. Jeremy Olson’s Plague Antenna / early transmission channels the painting’s atmosphere of foreboding into a contemporary allegory of collapsing techno-utopian faith.
Other responses extend Dalí’s lexicon into unexpected registers. Ryan Driscoll conjures the fading vision of forgotten gods; Ginny Casey situates objects within luminous voids that echo absence and erasure; Katherine Bradford’s House With Maiden suspends her spectral figures against radiant horizons; Julie Curtiss' Room With A View entwines snail forms into uncanny embraces; and Meghann Stephenson’s The Headless and Heartless stages a body pierced by sky, at once fragmented and transcendent.
Together, these works form a polyphonic dialogue with Dalí: reverence and resistance, beauty and disquiet, fantasy and collapse. Rather than replicating or rejecting the 1944 canvas, the artists widen its fissures, exposing fault lines that resonate today.
To stage this project in Richmond, with the VMFA’s masterpiece as both anchor and counterpoint, underscores Main Projects’ mission to situate ambitious contemporary dialogue outside traditional art capitals. At a moment when surrealism’s language of desire and disruption feels newly urgent, The God of the Bay of Roses demonstrates how a singular vision of the past can reanimate the present, opening portals into the unstable architectures of our time.