Galatea of the Spheres, 1952 by Salvador Dali

The Galatea of the Spheres is a marvelous portrait of Dali's wife Gala. In 1934 Dali and Gala were married in a civil ceremony in Paris and in 1958 the church permitted a Catholic ceremony (Gala's former husband died in 1952). Gala managed Dali's business affairs for their entire marriage a task to which the artist was unsuited. Dali considered Gala his world and his savior and signed many of his works with her name.

One of the most representative works from the nuclear mysticism period. It is the outcome of a Dali impassioned by science and for the theories of the disintegration of the atom. Gala's face is made up of a discontinuous, fragmented setting, densely populated by spheres, which on the axis of the canvas takes on a prodigious three-dimensional vision and perspective.

The following quote sums this particular style of Dali's,

The surrealists saw in Dali the promise of a breakthrough of the surrealist dilemma. Many of the surrealists had broken away from the movement, feeling that direct political action had to come before any mental revolutions. Dali put forth his "Paranoic-Critical method" as an alternative to having to politically conquer the world. He felt that his own vision could be imposed on and color the world to his liking so that it became unnecessary to change it objectively."