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Playfully set in front of Dan Colen’s long landscape painting, Mother (Distant Town), the bronze sculptural figure of Salvador Dalí’s, Alice in Wonderland, extends her body upward with the spirited, graceful gesture of jumping rope. One of Salvador Dalí’s most beloved characters was Alice from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” a tale, now widely known, of a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. Like Alice, Dalí travelled a long and arduous road through the land of dreams, by means of his artistic expression.

His imaginative and striking approach to every medium made him one of the best-known artists of the Surrealist movement and iconic artists of the twentieth century.

Surrealism challenges rational thought to assert the power of dream and the unconscious, which makes clear the connection between Dalí and the nonsensical storyline and extravagant characters of Alice’s adventures. The figure jumping rope first appeared in Dalí’s paintings in the 1930s as a depiction of his cousin Carolineta Barnadas Ferres, who tragically died of meningitis when the artist was 10 years old. A painfully dramatic moment for his family, Dalí processed his grief in adulthood when he began illustrating the figure of Carolineta on canvas—always dressed in white, like an apparition. Later, his depictions of Carolineta and Alice became synonymous.

Here we see that Alice has undergone a physical metamorphosis; her hands and hair have blossomed into roses signaling her eternal youth and femininity, and her face is overtaken by leaves shielding her humanity. The twisted cord of the jump rope frozen in motion above her head symbolizes the twists of daily life and the Grecian drapes of her dress allude to antiquity and classical beauty. The crutch, a common element in Dalí’s work, represents two opposing dualities: death and resurrection.

Contrasting the bronzy shine of Dalí’s Alice, Colen’s subdued texture of his painting, Mother (Distant Town), details flowing grass hanging over the short precipice of ground where a dark fantastical tree reaches out to a quaint town in the distance. If the dusk-like gradient purple sky or nostalgic imagery of this scene feels vaguely familiar, that is because for his Mother series, Colen appropriates stills from classic Disney animated films. The artist paints the settings of such recognizable works without the identifiable characters or signifiers of the beloved stories. Expanding a small animation cell into a monumentally scaled canvas brings to the forefront Colen’s deft mark-making and treatment of light. The lack of figure or narrative portrays natural, yet fantastical landscapes such as this still from Lady and the Tramp (1955), meticulously executed to attain a silky, matte surface quality in oil paint in Mother (Distant Town). Colen is intrigued by the ways in which this animated romance dramatizes differences in class and character between the canine protagonists through the film’s contrasting urban and suburban environments.