Louis Markoya and legends of the surreal
This, with admirers, is Louis Markoya, a member if the Collect Dali Yahoo Group who was Salvador Dali’s protege from 1971 to ‘75 and strives to keep his spirit alive with his expertise and his own art — and with brilliantly surreal moments like this one.
A huge crowd turned out in New York late last month for the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s new show “Dali and Film”, but I’m betting that Louis was the only person who showed up dressed as a Dali painting. He arrived from his home in Connecticut wearing a tuxedo that had leapt from the 1936 painting “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet”.
“A lot of people had no idea what to think,” Louis says of the reaction to his “formal drawerwear”.
“At least five times that night a person would get their nerve up and come to me to say, ‘That’s (fill in the adjective — great, wonderful, fantastic, etc),’ and follow up with, ‘Where did you get it?’ To which I calmly said, ‘I made it’, and the remakable and funny thing was that everyone had the same reaction: ‘YOU DID NOT!’”
The “Dali and Film” exhibition continues until September 15. MoMA has a pretty good overview online.
As if further proof were needed of his commitment to the cause, Louis sent me another photo from another occasion, “a surrealist ball that both HR Giger and Ernst Fuchs were supposed to attend (and did not)”. The exhibition was “Brave Destiny” in Brooklyn, around 2003, for which Louis created a piece called “Dali’s Anus” (a full post is coming up on that one).
“The show was supposed to feature several Dali originals,” Louis wrote at the Collect Dali site, and “was billed as the greatest modern surrealist show ever. Well, there were no Dalis, Giger and Fuchs did not appear, and the show was full of crappy unicorn and fantasy painters. But my costume was magnificent.” He “went over the top”, to use his his own words, and dressed as Dali’s painting “The Ship” from about 1943.
Much more about Louis in a moment but, coincidentally, a pair of the limited-edition bronzes that Dali had made in 1982 from “The Anthropomorphic Cabinet” were auctioned off recently by Sotheby’s. The one sold in Amsterdam brought 10,000 euros (I’m not sure of the price from the Paris sale), while a small bronze of his “Homage to Newton”, pictured further down in this post, drew 6,250 euros. See the rest.
