ART CITIES:N.York-Cy Twombly

Throughout his sixty-year career, Twombly infused the physical and emotional aspects of Abstract Expressionism with a wealth of historic and mythic allusion. He combined elements of gestural abstraction, drawing, and writing in a highly idiosyncratic and potent expression.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

At once epic and intimate, his work is steeped with references to poetry, classical mythology, and history. The alternation between the visible and the hidden, between present and past, and the struggle between memory and oblivion are unifying themes in his work. From 1946 until his death in 2011, Twombly created sculptural assemblages from found materials and objects-kitchen utensils, cardboard, leaves, and other debris, unifying the final form with a coat of dry white paint. In 1979 he began to cast some sculptures in bronze, thus preserving and transforming the disparate elements. The surface and patina of these cast bronzes evoke weathered artifacts exhumed from the earth; some contain allusions to Egyptian and Mesopotamian sculpture. In works such as Untitled (2004–09), there is an ecology of carefully balanced objects, a broom inside a funnel resting on a cylinder. Never before seen, Untitled (2004) is a sculptural monochrome of cast plaster and wooden elements, painted freely in brilliant sky-blue. The Bacchus series (2004-08) is charged with visceral energies. In huge arcs and drips of sanguine paint, sensation courses through the annals of myth and history. In later untitled works, cursive white lines against dark blue fields similarly describe the gestural force that first appeared in the “blackboard” paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s. Blooming (2001–08) is an efflorescent ten-panel painting spanning more than sixteen feet in width. Twombly captures and memorializes in patches of lush crayon and paint, and drips and flows of startling color, the fragile, heady nature of the peony flowers so revered in Japanese aesthetic contemplation.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 23/4-20/6/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com