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Displaying items by tag: Cy Twombly
The anxiously awaited event, Art Basel, begins tonight, December 5, with a VIP preview and runs through Sunday, December 9. Now in its 11th year, Art Basel has become a defining event in the art world and each year the city of Miami is taken over by collectors, curators, artists, celebrities, and art enthusiasts as well as a host of art fairs.
Taking place at the Miami Beach Convention Center, Art Basel features over 260 big-name galleries from around the world and exhibits works by more than 2,000 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Renowned for its support of young and emerging artists and galleries, Art Basel includes performance art, public art projects, lectures, and video art installations. Some exhibitor highlights include Acquavella Galleries, Mary Boone Gallery, Gagosian Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, and White Cube, among many others.
Regarded as Miami art week’s anchor fair, Art Miami got a head start on Art Basel and hosted a VIP preview on December 4 at the Art Miami Pavilion in the city’s Wynwood Arts District. The fair, which features modern and contemporary offerings from more than 125 international galleries, runs from December 5 through December 9. While Art Basel tends to be spotlighted during Miami’s art week, Art Miami is the original and longest-running contemporary art fair to be held in the area with 23 years under its belt. Exhibitors include Douglas Dawson Gallery, Eli Klein Fine Art, Haunch of Venison, Hollis Taggart Gallery, Jerald Melberg Gallery, Michael Goedhuis, and Waterhouse & Dodd.
This year, Art Miami coincides with the inaugural CONTEXT art fair, which features 50 galleries representing emerging and mid-career artists. Located in an ultramodern pavilion adjacent to Art Miami, CONTEXT boasts indoor and outdoor projects as well as solo artist installations, curated projects, and multimedia exhibits. Between Art Miami and CONTEXT, there will be over 200,000 square feet of exhibition space and over 250 participating galleries.
Another highlight of the city’s art week is Scope Miami, which opened on December 4 with a VIP preview and will run through December 9 at a new location in the midtown arts district. With a 100,000 square foot pavilion, Scope features 20 new galleries as part of its “Breeder Program” and 85 established exhibitors. Besides modern and contemporary art, there will be design, music, and fashion offerings.
Pulse Miami opens to the public on December 6 and runs through December 9 at The Ice Palace Studios. One of Art Basel’s many satellite fairs, Pulse is in its eighth year and features 86 international galleries exhibiting works on paper, paintings, sculptures, performances, installations, and video art. Pulse also includes its signature series, Pulse Projects, a selection of installations proposed by galleries and not-for-profit institutions. This year’s Pulse Projects includes a short film by Zackary Drucker shown earlier this year at MoMA PS1, marble installations courtesy of Venske & Spanle and Margaret Thatcher Projects, and a special screening of street artist Invader’s Art 4 Space, courtesy of Jonathan LeVine Gallery.
While there are countless fairs, events, parties, concerts, and openings happening in Miami this week, one not to be missed affair is the Masterpieces from the Berardo Collection exhibit at the Gary Nader Art Centre. Opening on December 5, the show features pieces from one of the finest modern and contemporary art collections in existence. Hand-picked from the private holdings of Joe Berardo, a Portuguese mogul, the 110 works are worth $500 million. Featured artists include Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and many more.
Considered one of the world’s most groundbreaking contemporary artists, Cy Twombly evaded classification while remaining culturally and artistically relevant from the early 1950s to the present. On Thursday, Gagosian Gallery mounted the dual tribute exhibitions, Cy Twombly: Last Paintings and Cy Twombly: A Survey of Photographs 1954–2011. The show will remain on view through December 22, 2012.
The eight untitled paintings are closely related to the Camino Real group that appeared at Gagosian Paris’ inaugural exhibition in 2010. Featuring bold colors and sweeping, gestural brushwork, the paintings exude the raw energy that typified Twombly’s work. Last Paintings opened in Los Angeles earlier this year and traveled to Hong Kong before opening in New York.
A Survey of Photographs features everything from early studio images taken in the 1950s to a group of landscapes taken in St. Barths in 2011, the year of Twombly’s death. While mainly regarded as a painter, Twombly’s photographic work has been the subject of a number of major exhibitions since 2008. Gagosian’s exhibition is the most comprehensive of its kind to take place in the United States to date.
The Gagosian Gallery has announced that they will be participating in ArtRio for the first time this year. Held September 12-16, ArtRio features major works by current artists and other modern masters. Gagosian plans to not only have a booth at the fair, but will also hold a sculpture exhibition in an offsite warehouse. Both the booth and the warehouse will be designed by Brazilian designer Claudia Moreira Salles.
There has been some chatter about Gagosian expanding internationally and as Brazil's art market has expanded considerably in recent years, ArtRio seems a logical destination for Gagosian. Works by Damien Hirst, Cecily Brown, Alexander Calder, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and many others will be on view.
ArtRio will coincide with the first major retrospective of Alberto Giacometti in South America. The show will run through September 16th at the Museu de Arte de Moderne do Rio de Janeiro and brings together 280 works from the Fondation Alberto e Annette Giacometti in Paris, which is represented by the Gagosian Gallery.
Cy Twombly, the US artist whose graffiti-style paintings on large canvases made him the heir to Jackson Pollock in the eyes of many, has died in hospital in Rome at the age of 83.
After emerging from the New York art scene of the 1950s, he developed a deep association with Mediterranean Europe, drawing inspiration from its history, poetry and ancient myths. As a painter, he was known for abstract works combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines, and use of words and graffiti – but is regarded as a key figure among a generation of artists who strove to evolve beyond abstract expressionism.
Born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, he took on his father's nickname, Cy. After studies at American art colleges, he came to Europe and travelled extensively. In later years he was also influenced by his service as a cryptologist in the US military.
After spending much of the 1950s in New York, where friends included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly left for Italy which was to become a second home. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1964 before he began drifting away from expressionism and embarking on the abstract sculptures so closely associated with him.
Last year, he painted a ceiling of the Louvre in Paris, the first artist given this honour since Georges Braque in the 1950s. For that work he chose something simple: a deep blue background punctuated with floating discs and emblazoned with the names of sculptors from ancient Greece, apt for a gallery of bronzes.
"I got into something new in old age," he said of his unusual choice of colour.
Larry Gagosian, the owner of the Gagosian gallery, which has had close ties with Twombly, said: "The art world has lost a true genius and a completely original talent. And, for those fortunate enough to have known him, a great human being.
"Even though Cy might have been regarded as reclusive, he didn't retreat to an ivory tower. He was happy to remain connected and live in the present. Despite his increasing fame, he never lost the playfulness and sense of humour that was his true nature, and, more importantly, he retained his humility. For me personally, it is an incredibly sad day and my thoughts are with Cy's family and close friends."
France's culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said: "A great American painter who deeply loved old Europe has just left us. His work was deeply marked by his passion for Greek and Roman antiquity, and its mythology, which for him was a source of limitless inspiration."
Twombly's work sold for millions and ignited the passions of followers. In 2007, a woman was arrested in France for kissing an all-white canvas he painted. Restorers had trouble removing the lipstick and she was ordered to pay compensation.
He had been living in Italy, and entered hospital last week, according to Eric Mezil, director of the Collection Lambert gallery in Avignon, where a show of Twombly's photographs opened last month.
One of his most important exhibitions was at Tate Modern in 2008, featuring Quattro Stagioni (Four Seasons), A Painting in Four Parts, of 1993-94.
"Ah, it goes, is lost," Twombly scrawled in pencil on one of the four tall canvases, in a reflection of some of the themes to which he often returned: time, love, and doomed desire.
New York, March 11, 2011—The Museum of Modern Art will acquire two landmark paintings
from the 1950s and a group of seven sculptures ranging in date from 1954 to 2005 by Cy
Twombly, widely regarded as one of today’s most important living artists, announces MoMA
Director Glenn D. Lowry. All of the works are from the artist’s personal collection, and the
sculptures will be the first by Twombly to enter MoMA’s collection. With these additions to the
eight paintings and numerous works on paper by Twombly, the Museum will immeasurably
strengthen its holdings of works by Twombly, representing all six decades of the artist’s career.
The nine works will be exhibited together in the Museum from May 20 to October 3, 2011.
“It has long been a priority for the Museum to build an in-depth collection of Twombly’s
work, and the addition of these two major paintings and seven sculptures make a powerful
statement about a transformative moment in the history of the American avant-garde,” said Mr.
Lowry. “We are extremely grateful to the donors who have made this possible, and especially to
the artist, who was willing to share with the Museum these great works, which he has kept in his
own collection for many years.”
Tiznit, one of a small number of paintings that Twombly made in New York City during the
summer of 1953, will become the earliest work by the artist in MoMA’s collection. Made just after
a nine-month trip with Robert Rauschenberg in Italy and North Africa, the painting is named for a
town in Morocco. Primitivist in character, Tiznit is made with lead white enamel house paint,
pencil, and crayon. Evident in the painting are the connections it makes to the European and
American artists crucial to Twombly’s formation, revealing the 25 year-old artist’s keen awareness
of the work of New York artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jean Dubuffet. It was
shown at the Stable gallery in a joint exhibition with Robert Rauschenberg in 1953. The painting is
a promised gift of anonymous donors.
Academy was painted in New York in the summer of 1955 and was first shown in January
1956 in Twombly’s second solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery. Academy presents the birth of
Twombly’s own artistic language: legible letters and words give way to scrawling and scribbling,
jittery lines, and scratches, with the artist reconfiguring the acts of writing, drawing, and painting
in order to provoke a new way of seeing. This canvas represents the moment at which Twombly
declared his independence from the Abstract Expressionist idiom and invented a mode of working
that would govern his next half-century of his art. Made in the same year as Jasper Johns’s Flag
and Robert Rauschenberg’s Rebus, it forms with these two paintings already in the Museum’s
collection an astoundingly powerful statement about a transformative moment in the history of
the American avant-garde. The painting was purchased for the collection by the Museum.
The Museum’s last major acquisition of Twombly’s paintings was on the occasion of the
major 1994 retrospective of the artist’s work, organized by Kirk Varnedoe, at which time the
paintings Leda and the Swan (1962), Untitled (1970), and the Four Seasons (1993-94) entered
the collection.
Twombly’s sculptures are an integral but little known aspect of his practice over the course
of the last six decades. These works generally are made from found materials, plaster, wood, and
white paint, and their humble origins remain readily evident in the finished works. All are of
relatively small scale, as Twombly has wished them to be things that he himself can construct,
manipulate and move around the studio. Their dialogue with Twombly’s paintings rests not only
in the fact of the material of white paint, but in their classical sources and their expressive
majesty. Like the works of Constantin Brancusi or Alberto Giacometti, they function especially
beautifully in relation to one another, and the artist’s preference is that they be presented in
groups.
The seven sculptures represent the full span of Twombly’s career, beginning with two of
the few surviving sculptures of the 1950s: Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime-Green Python)
(1954) and Untitled (1955), which represent the beginning of Twombly’s sculptural activity and
show a relationship to his painting at this pivotal moment in his work. The remaining sculptures
were executed between 1976 and 2005, all representing different moments during which Twombly
has been at his most inventive and audacious as a sculptor. One of the sculptures is a promised
gift of Steven and Alexandra Cohen, one is a promised gift of anonymous donors, and one is a gift
of the Cy Twombly Foundation. Four were purchased for the collection with Museum funds and
generous gifts from trustees.
Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture,
notes that, “Until the past decade or so, Twombly’s sculptures have been overlooked in relation to
his paintings. In fact the two practices are closely related, and we will now be able to present a
fuller and more accurate portrayal of Twombly’s achievements as an artist. Similarly, these two
early paintings finally provide a true beginning to our account of this remarkable career.”
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