September 15–December 17, 2022
Cy Twombly’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper will be on display at an exhibition produced by Gagosian and the Cy Twombly Foundation. It brings together artwork created in the last ten years of Twombly’s life and is the artist’s first showing at the Beverly Hills gallery since Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings in 2012.
Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, which runs from August 2 through October 30, 2022, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, coexists with Gagosian’s show. Making Past Present highlights Twombly’s involvement with the art, culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean and is the first institutional presentation of the artist in Los Angeles in nearly three decades. It will visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2023.
In the 2000s, Twombly resumed painting on a big scale while living and working in Gaeta, Italy, and Lexington, Virginia. The change came after his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1994 and the acclaimed acclaim of Lepanto, a group of twelve paintings that had their world premiere at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In these pieces, he changed how he used color, using palettes of rich, saturated tones. Denser brushstrokes resemble the petals of peonies and chrysanthemums, while slender lines and loops of paint balance expressive vitality and elegance. The paintings reflect on poetry, history, and myth in a dynamic yet elegiac way. They are infused with the free-spirited energy of Bacchanalia and the vitality of new blooms.
Untitled I-VI (Green Painting) (2002–03), a group of six panels made up of lush greens and brilliant white, is one standout. It was only previously displayed as a part of the 2016 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible. As well as his sculptures, which take his interests in geometry, gesture, and materiality into three dimensions, Twombly’s works on paper blur the lines between painting, drawing, and writing. These pieces, which were put together from scraps of wood, plaster, and other materials he found in his studio, resemble pieces of the monumental architectural and sculptural forms from ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece. In order to unite the sculptures’ many forms while preserving the tactile quality of their surfaces, Twombly frequently painted the sculptures white or had them cast in bronze.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, as well as a discussion on Twombly between the artists Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu.
Gagosian Beverly Hills
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, ca 90210
+1 310 271 9400
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Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–5:30