Adam Neeley's Dalí's Garden Debuts at PAD Paris with Surreal Color

At PAD Paris, the most practical thing in Adam Neeley’s Dalí’s Garden was also the most fantastical: anodized titanium in electric blues, violets, and greens that made the gemstones feel newly alive. Shown April 8 to 12 at the Jardin des Tuileries, where PAD traces its roots to 1998 as the first design fair in the world, the collection read less like costume jewelry fantasy than a test case for how surreal color might travel into earrings, pendants, and stacking pieces that people can actually wear.

The collection began in a kitchen, not a studio. Neeley was cooking from Salvador and Gala Dalí’s 1973 cookbook, Les dîners de Gala, fell asleep, and dreamed the couple invited him to a moonlit garden party. He has said that vision became the creative compass for Dalí’s Garden, a project he spent the better part of five years developing. Rather than echoing melting clocks or lobster phones, the work pushes toward a subtler Dalí language, one built on the meeting point of the conscious and unconscious and translated through metal, stone, and color.

That matters because this is where the high-jewelry idea can slim down for real life. Second Pétale Gallery presented Neeley under curator Arina Pouzoullic, and at Stand 25 the gallery listed the Callara Earrings, a 2025 design in tourmaline, garnet, diamond, titanium, and white gold. In other words, the vocabulary of the collection is already moving into the categories readers are most likely to buy first: earrings that frame the face, pendants that sit close to the skin, and stackable pieces that can layer without the heaviness of a full statement necklace.

Neeley’s reputation gives the color experiment real weight. JCK says he has 17 AGTA Spectrum Awards and spent years building Dalí’s Garden. His larger body of work already shows the same mix of old-world goldsmithing and modern process. A retrospective at Laguna Art Museum, Modern Alchemy, featured more than 100 works, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History includes his South Sea Glow necklace in its permanent collection. Neeley has said he created SpectraGold after many failed attempts to realize an ombré gold vision, a detail that helps explain why his color never feels decorative for decoration’s sake.

Neeley opened his Laguna Beach gallery in 2006, after formal study at the Gemological Institute of America and Le Arti Orafe in Florence. Dalí’s Garden will continue with private events in the United States, but its clearest afterlife may be in the smaller, more wearable pieces it points toward: fine jewelry where surreal color is no longer a spectacle reserved for the salon, but a language ready for everyday wear.