Alica Kucharovič

Retart brings you an original toy that is at the same time a unique collector´s item. The design handmade toys from our limited edition “Famous Artist Toys” revive three internationally renowned fine artists whose works have provoked great acclaim. On the toys, made of polyester, we depicted features and clothes typical for these artists. The material is soft to the touch and it is printed with wearproof ecological colours. The toy is filled with a soft substance and it has a wire skeleton that can be bent. It is packaged with a text informing about the life and work of the artist. The size of the toy is 42 cm x12 cm and it weights 75 grams. It can be used for playing and/or as an interesting decoration.

Salvador Dalí (1904-89) was a Catalan painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named ‘critical paranoia’. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”