Di Donna will hold the first major exhibition of Dali’s works in the past two years in New York

As Emmanuel Di Donna prepares to leave his Madison Avenue gallery, the veteran dealer is returning to an artist most people thought they already knew.

This spring, Di Donner Gallery will host one of the most important Salvador Dali exhibitions in New York in decades. “Dali: The Great Years, 1929-1939,” on view April 16-June 13, brings together more than two dozen paintings, sculptures and works on paper, focusing on a decade in which the artist shaped his visual language and public image.

It is Dali’s first major exhibition in the city since the 2008 MoMA show, and the last show in DiDonner’s current space before embarking on a new venture with Pace and David Schrader.

For a dealer known for expanding the Surrealist canon—often spotlighting overlooked figures and redefining the movement’s global influence—the decision to focus on Dalí seemed obvious.

“There hasn’t been a real Dalí exhibition in New York for several years,” DiDonna said, noting that organizing one is very difficult. He noted that the best works are held primarily by museums and major collections, which serve as the backbone of the entire institution. “They’re magnets,” he said. “People don’t want them to leave, even for a few months.”

Loan institutions for this exhibition include the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. (A few works in the exhibition are available for sale).

This scarcity shapes the market and public’s understanding of artists. Dali is one of the most recognizable names in 20th-century art, but his reputation has been flattened to a handful of images—melting clocks, dramatic mustaches—rather than the psychologically dense, formally rigorous works of his early career.

Di Donner’s exhibition focuses on the period between 1929 and 1939, when Dali aligned himself with the Surrealists, developed his paranoid-critical approach, and began creating the images that define his legacy. As DiDonna said, “Those ten years were the ten years that Dalí became Dalí.”

The exhibition traces the story of an artist who channeled Freud, faced personal trauma, and transformed those impulses into carefully rendered dreams. Works from this period reveal an approach that is both profoundly intellectual and dramatic, breaking down the boundaries between the unconscious and the visible world.

Meanwhile, Dalí was moving far beyond the canvas. He collaborated with such unlikely figures as Coco Chanel and Harpo Marx, sending the latter a harp strung from barbed wire and later working on film ideas with him, gestures that treated pop culture as material to be reinvented rather than as something less than fine art.

Contemporary artists now regularly collaborate with global brands; Louis Vuitton with Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama, and Damien Hirst with Alexander McQueen. Today, the boundaries between art, fashion and commerce have become so thin that they are almost non-existent. Dalí had already been involved in this field decades earlier, viewing film, design and celebrity as extensions of his practice rather than distractions.

If this breadth now feels contemporary, it also complicates the artist’s position in the market. Surrealism has boomed in recent years, with artists such as Rene Magritte and Leonora Carrington achieving record prices at auction. Yet the market for Dalí remains relatively uneven, in part because few of the most important works of this formative decade have come to market.

The broader Surrealism category has enjoyed substantial long-term growth, with exponential growth of more than 2,400% since 1980, according to ARTDAI, although individual markets have fluctuated depending on the supply of top works.

For DiDonna, the exhibition unleashed this focus. Without them, he argued, even strong markets would grind to a halt. Not for lack of interest, but for lack of context. Large exhibitions create the conditions for collectors to understand what they are seeing and why it matters, triggering a chain reaction from scholarship to visibility to price, he said.

That logic has guided his plans since the gallery opened in 2010. Over the next few years, Di Donna has focused on rigorously researched exhibitions that reposition the artist within a broader narrative. Past projects have explored underappreciated Surrealists and unexpected conversations, including the recent pairing of Magritte and Les Lalani, built around shared emotions.

Dali’s exhibition, however, represented a different ambition. This is not an attempt to rediscover a neglected figure, but to deepen the understanding of a figure who has never faded from view.

For visitors, Di Donna hopes the exhibition will shift attention away from Dalí’s caricatures and toward the complexity of his work. “People knew Dalí,” he said. “But they don’t see enough.”

As a final statement in this space, the exhibition sits somewhere between a climax and a fulcrum: a return to one of Surrealism’s central figures at a moment when the Surrealist movement itself was being revisited and increasingly re-evaluated.