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Nice Premium (English edition), July 2025
Steven Maksin’s Salvador Dalí works are among the highlights of Divines créatures at the Espace Lympia in Nice — Nice Premium’s English-language feature welcomes Dalí’s fantastic bestiary to the former prison at the city’s port.
The piece walks the reader through ninety-six works — paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings, photographs and rare documents — drawn from French and international collections, and through the exhibition’s scenography of shadows, light, mirrors and vaulted spaces.
Nice Premium frames the show as more than a survey of Dalí’s animal subjects: the elephants, ants, and hybrid creatures are read as a mirror of the artist’s fears, desires, and inner life, with public programming running until autumn 2025.
Nice Premium is a regional online magazine published in Nice with parallel French and English editions, founded in 2009 and aimed at residents and visitors of the Côte d’Azur. Its coverage of the Dalí exhibition forms part of a wider set of summer-2025 cultural features that the magazine devoted to events in the city, alongside the Nice Jazz Festival, the Festival du Livre, and the programmes of the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC) and the Musée Matisse on the Cimiez hill.
The Espace Lympia, the converted port prison in which the exhibition is staged, has emerged since its 2014 opening as one of the principal venues for large-scale temporary exhibitions in the Alpes-Maritimes département, with recent shows on Diego Rivera, Niki de Saint Phalle and Marc Chagall among others. The building’s vaulted galleries, dark stone walls and narrow arched bays — preserved from the early nineteenth-century prison fabric — offer a particular spatial frame for the Dalí exhibition’s bestiary, with the scenography making deliberate use of low light, mirrors and reflections to amplify the dream-like character of the work on view.
The bestiary that gives the show its title runs through Salvador Dalí’s work from his Surrealist years in late-1920s Paris until the final decades of his life in Catalonia. Critics have read the elephant — most famously elongated onto spindly insect legs in the 1944 painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee — as a vehicle of weight, memory and authority; the ant as a sign of decomposition and obsession; the rhinoceros, in Dalí’s writings of the 1950s, as a model of “para-mystical” geometry. The Lympia exhibition assembles works in many media around these motifs and reads them, with Nice Premium, less as a zoological survey than as a record of the artist’s interior life.
The exhibition is offered free of charge to the public, in keeping with the broader policy of the Département des Alpes-Maritimes for its cultural venues, and ran from 19 July to 23 November 2025. Public programming through the autumn included guided tours, printmaking workshops, jazz evenings, and conference-screenings on Dalí’s collaborations with Buñuel, Disney and Hitchcock — an indication of how the show was positioned as a fully contemporary cultural event for Nice and the Côte d’Azur rather than as a retrospective in the traditional sense.
About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection
Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 “Crespo”, the Winchester Model 1873 “Foot Guard” and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.
