Dalí's Freudian Universe at the Thyssen Museum

Dalí started reading Freud in the early 1920s, while living at Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes, and never got him out of his head. The Thyssen's big autumn show is devoted to that obsession, which ended with the two men meeting in London in 1938. 🎨🧠

Curated by Jaime Brihuega, the exhibition rereads the painter's entire career through the lens of psychoanalysis.

🎨 DALÍ'S FREUDIAN UNIVERSE

📅 20 October 2026 to 24 January 2027

🕐 Tuesday to Friday and Sunday, 10 am to 7 pm · Saturday, 10 am to 11 pm · Closed on Mondays

📍 Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, ground-floor galleries · Paseo del Prado, 8

🎟️ General admission €14 · Free on Saturdays from 9 to 11 pm

🧠 The exhibition

Six chronological sections, each tied to a chapter of his life: the complex family world of his childhood, his move into Surrealism from 1926, the paranoiac-critical method, the meeting with Freud and the nuclear-mystical period, through to his late works in Catalonia.

Alongside Dalí's paintings hang reference works by Ingres, Severini, Arp, Schwitters, Tanguy and Federico García Lorca, plus drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal and by Sigmund Freud himself.

🏛️ Planning your visit

The route takes about an hour and a quarter, with artworks and videos. Ground-floor galleries have limited capacity, so tickets come with a time slot. Admission also covers the permanent collection. Guided tours run on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and a lecture series runs from 28 October to 25 November.

ℹ️ Good to know: the museum warns that some works deal with sexuality. On 24 and 31 December it closes at 3 pm, and it is closed on 25 December and 1 January. Under-18s go free.

✨ Dalí's dreams, read through Freud's glasses.