Formal Silence Wins Second Place at The Dalí Museum’s Existentialism Art Contest

The contest

The contest drew its inspiration from the museum’s special exhibition Alberto Giacometti & Salvador Dalí: Through & Beyond Surrealism, created in partnership with the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti. Both artists explored isolated figures and a shared preoccupation with human solitude and existential vulnerability. The museum invited artists to challenge perceptions of reality and to share their own Existentialist art.

First Place went to Juliana Ulloa for Between Becoming and Disappearing, Second Place to Guy Hivroni for Formal Silence, and Third Place to Jerome Patryjak for Murphy, Mercer, Molloy, Moran and Malone. The full results and the finalists’ works are on The Dalí Museum’s website.

The work

A sculpture on restraint and the quiet weight of social expectation. Formal attire — shirt, suspenders and bowtie — replaces the body, shaping presence through posture rather than voice. Silence becomes the form that holds dignity.

In the artist’s words

Formal Silence presents a ceramic garment without a body, standing upright as a quiet remnant of human presence. Shaped through wheel throwing and hand sculpting, the work holds an empty interior where the wearer once existed.

The absence becomes the subject. The sculpture reflects on identity stripped of action, authority emptied of its figure, and existence defined by what remains rather than what is shown.

In dialogue with existential thought, the work invites contemplation of presence through withdrawal, and of meaning found not in expression, but in restraint.

Guy Hivroni’s statement for the contest, as published by The Dalí Museum.

Part of Portraits of NoBody

Formal Silence belongs to Portraits of NoBody, Guy Hivroni’s ongoing body of work of garments shown without the body that wore them. See the work →