Salvador Dalí — La Gare de Perpignan — Pair of Exhibition Invitation Cards, Galerie André François Petit, Paris, 1977

Pair of original exhibition invitation cards
Galerie André François Petit, 196 Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris
22 × 16.5 cm each
Offset print on cream card stock
November–December 1977 / 8–22 December 1977

Two related invitation cards issued in connection with Salvador Dalí’s late 1977 presentation of La Gare de Perpignan at Galerie André François Petit, Paris. One card reproduces a dark, radiant surreal composition associated with Dalí’s theatrical late-period cosmology; the second presents the exhibition through restrained typographic announcement text, including references to stereoscopic painting experiments and a copper portrait of Gala shown “in process.”

The exhibition centred around La Gare de Perpignan, one of Dalí’s most mythologized paintings, tied to his declaration that the Perpignan railway station represented the “centre of the universe.” By the late 1970s Dalí was operating simultaneously as Surrealist survivor, celebrity image-maker, luxury cultural figure, and active technical experimenter. The reference to stereoscopic oil painting and the inclusion of Robert Descharnes — Dalí’s close collaborator, photographer, archivist, and later estate authority — places the material directly within the artist’s inner production network during the final decades of his career.

What survives here is not simply exhibition publicity but a small paper structure surrounding the circulation of Dalí in Paris at the end of the 1970s. One card stages the mythology through image; the other reduces the exhibition to administrative language, dates, processes, and institutional framing. Together they form a concise document of how Surrealism persisted through gallery systems, print culture, collector mailing networks, and controlled spectacle long after its historical avant-garde moment had passed.

Scarcer than later Dalí posters and commercial reproductions, gallery-issued paper ephemera from this period survives irregularly and was rarely preserved systematically.

Condition: Good vintage condition overall. Light handling wear, faint age toning, soft edge wear, minor surface marks consistent with surviving gallery ephemera from the period.

Shipping and handling included.