Salvador Dali's 'Lobster telephone' is one of the Spanish artists' most famous art works. Istanbul's Sakip Sabanci Museum will host a huge exhibition of 270 works by the late surrealist later this year.(Xinhua/AFP file Photo)

Istanbul's Sakip Sabanci Museum will host a huge modern art exhibition of 270 works by the late Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali later this year, according to media reports Tuesday.

The show -- from Sept. 19 until Jan. 19 -- will be the largest ever mounted by the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation outside its base in the artist's Catalan hometown, with 33 oil paintings, 113 sketches and 123 graphics.

The foundation was set up in 1983 by the artist himself. It owns 4,000 of his works -- the largest such collection in the world.

The Turkish museum opened in Istanbul in 2002 in a former Ottoman mansion on the west bank of the Bosphorus with the ambition of giving the city and Turkey a gallery of truly international standing.

In 2005 and 2006 a similar exhibition of works by another Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso, broke all records for a Turkish gallery, attracting a quarter of a million art lovers.

Dali was born in the Catalan town of Figueres in 1904 and died there in 1989. He was an extraordinary artist and self-publicist, becoming the most famous proponent of surrealism in painting, sculpture and photography.

(Xinhua/Agencies March 25,2008)