Gagosian Press Release
Published 9/22/2022 8:57 am PST

In parallel to the J. Paul Getty Museum's exhibition Cy Twombly: Making Past Present from August 2 through October 30, 2022. The Gagosian exhibition, developed in partnership with the Cy Twombly Foundation, includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Cy Twombly. It is the artist's first visit to the Beverly Hills gallery since Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings in 2012, and it contains works from the artist's final decade. Making Past Present is Twombly's first institutional display in Los Angeles in almost three decades, and it will go to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2023.

In the 2000s, Twombly returned to large-scale painting, working in Gaeta, Italy, and Lexington, Virginia. He made the switch after his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1994 and the critical success of Lepanto, a suite of twelve paintings first shown at the 49th Biennale di Venezia in 2001. In these works, he used palettes of lush, saturated colors to take a new approach to color. Slender paint lines and loops combine expressive vitality and elegance, while bolder strokes are reminiscent of peony and chrysanthemum petals. The paintings have the unfettered energy of a Bacchanalia and the vivacity of young blossoms; they are both exuberant and elegiac, reflecting on poetry, history, and myth.

Untitled I-VI (Green Painting) (2002-03), a collection of six panels in rich greens and vivid white, standout. It was originally exhibited just once, as part of the Met's 2016 exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible. Twombly's works on paper, which blur the distinctions between painting, drawing, and writing, as well as his sculptures, which carry his concerns with geometry, gesture, and materiality into three dimensions, are also included. These works, built of plaster, wood, and fragments found in his workshop, mimic relics of monumental architectural and sculptural forms from ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Twombly's sculptures were usually painted or cast in bronze, merging their varied forms while retaining the tactility of their surfaces.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with a conversation on Twombly between artists Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu.

Julian Lucas, is a photographer, creative strategist, and writer in training, but mostly a photographer. Julian also works as a housing specialist which, includes linking unhoused veterans to housing.