Surreal McCoy

Salvador Dali’s surrealist imagebank of garish album cover-worthy dreamscapes is one of the best known in 20th-century art. For that reason the prints on display in Salvador Dali: 100 Years at Skot Foreman Fine Art will feel to many like a shocking departure from the artist’s trippy lexicon of melting clocks and headless nude torsos.

A silly, fanciful, even confectionary Dali is on display in Skot Foreman’s survey of prints by the artist, coincident with what would have been the Spanish surrealist’s 100th birthday.

Certain familiar Dali touchstones are well represented in Dali, like that vast eternal void unfolding on the horizon behind the central action of each image. But many of the works in this revealing, visually eclectic show are surprising for their divergence from Dali’s stylistic trick bag, even if his persistent themes of religion and sex linger. Much of the work in Dali is exuberant and cheerful in a way distinct from the often gloomy, eerie, psychologically heavy paintings that have made art like “The Persistence of Memory” legendary. Instead these Dalis often recall Andy Warhol’s early illustration work, and show a streak of fanciful romanticism and delicate charm in Dali’s off-the-cuff sketches, whimsical content and washes of delicate, creamy color.

“The Ballet of the Flowers (Fashion Designer),” for instance, could be a vintage — albeit quirky — illustration from a fashion magazine. In the image a woman has a bouquet of posies where her head should be and is flanked by two mannequins rendered in sugary pastels. Fragile petit-four colors add an amazing liveliness and charm to such works. The cursorily executed engraving “Venus, Mars et Cupidon,” from 1970-72 is a frou frou medley of seafoams, peaches and the erotic blushing pinks of Mars and Venus in a sexy embrace. The nursery-school-gone-psychedelic “The Elephant and the Monkey” (1974) features an equally scrumptious wash of lemons and velvety grays.

“Six Eggs” is a similarly witty, frothy image of a jaunty man sketched quickly, in a cyclone of blue lines, being offered a dish of six sexually provocative eggs by an unseen woman with a bumblebee at her crotch and a drip from her toe. The work is Dr. Seuss silly in its dandified outsize gestures and touches of inspired daffiness. It also has a casual, child-like spirit capable of reminding viewers all over again of the supremely odd, inventive personality of that curly-mustached man who once declared, “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dali.”

Salvador Dali: 100 Years runs through April 18 at Skot Foreman Fine Art, 315 Peters St., Atlanta. 404-222-0440. www.skotforeman.com. Hours: Tues-Sat. 11-6.