Peace activist and entrepreneur-turned-artist Matt Lamb is once again about to go from being an admirer of Salvador Dali to sharing a room with him next month when Lamb opens the Chicago reiteration of the Dali-Lamb Museum, featuring original works by the Spanish surrealist hung alongside Lamb’s own paintings.

The 20,000-square-foot gallery space, located at River East Art Center, 435 E. Illinois, will be home to one of five collections that feature Lamb and Dali on the same walls. Similar showings have opened in Argentina, Russia, Spain and Germany.

The most recent collection—which will also include sculptures, sketches and personal effects of Dali’s such as family photos and Coco Chanel postcards—is coming to Chicago on loan through a partnership between Lamb and the Barcelona-based businessman Juan Bofill.

Lamb, who may be best known for his participatory anti-violence project “Umbrellas for Peace,” said that his participation in the collection was the result of “a kindred spirit” that he feels toward Dali and Spanish artists in general.

“Spain was always a place of strife, and the artists, to me, were individuals,” he said. “I have a very philosophical closeness with that type of artist.”

Bofill first approached Lamb years ago when he asked the artist to show work in his Dali Museum in Barcelona. Since then, the friendship between the two has blossomed into a 30-year loan that will bring $500 million worth of Dali works from Bofill’s private collection across the pond.

Lamb’s own work has been up in the Streeterville gallery since earlier this year.

Bofill said he saw a number of connections between the Dali and Lamb. “They are both very interesting, international artists,” Bofill said. “They both brought ideas to the art world in their own ways.”

A Bridgeport native, Lamb was born the son of a funeral director. At the age of 18, he became a partner in the business and expanded the family-owned parlor into one of the largest funerary enterprises in Illinois, making millions and developing a drinking habit that would eventually lead him to change his path in life.

After being diagnosed with mononucleosis in the mid-1980s, Lamb sold the company and took up painting.

Lamb’s works play in a range of predominantly bright colors; abstractions taking shape through his own unique treatment process that involves dipping and drying canvasses in corrosive solutions.

His first muse, appropriately enough, was the flower.

“Unlike the funeral bouquets for which he’d always demanded absolute symmetry, the floral still lifes he painted…were far from fastidious,” wrote Richard Speer in his biography of Lamb. “They are miracles of surface, each bloom an over generous dollop of paint puckered by his alchemical recipe of repellent ingredients.”

From there, Lamb began his journey as an outsider artist, working first in his rented Chicago studio and then expanding his operation to Ireland, Argentina and the Florida Keys.

His work has since gained international recognition, showing in exhibitions at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Westminster Cathedral in London and at venues across nearly every continent.

Lamb makes no bones about his transition from capitalist to visualist.

“I was very fortunate, I never had to sell a piece of art to eat,” he said.

As a former businessman, Roman-Catholic and a recovering alcoholic, Lamb has plenty of subject material to work with. But recently all he wanted to talk about was peace.

“I believe that we have institutionalized not being nice to each other,” he said.

In his umbrellas project, which he launched shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, Lamb held a workshop in Washington D.C. for children whose parents had died in the attacks. To express their emotions, the kids painted and decorated umbrellas which were later displayed on Capitol Hill.

The project has since been reenacted in schools and festivals in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and in cities throughout North and South America.

Simple exercises like these, he said, can make a dent in stemming violence at the source.

As in most of his previous artistic work, Lamb said that he sees the Dali-Lamb museum as an opportunity to talk to people about the alternatives to violence, from the battlefield to the schoolyard. He said he plans to set up programs at the museum, including a workshop for the umbrellas project, to continue to push his message to people of all ages.

“We’ll set up the culture where, if you have a problem, the first thing you do isn’t grab a bat or throw a punch,” he said. “To me that’s a start.”

The Dali-Lamb Museum will open to the public in January, with a grand opening set for May. The collection is also slated to eventually feature original works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Marc Chagall, among others.