Cy Twombly
12 Sep 2015 - 13 Mar 2016
CY TWOMBLY
Painting & Sculpture
12 September 2015 – 13 March 2016
The American Cy Twombly was a key member of the new generation of artists to emerge in the 1950s. Like his close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he broke away from American Expressionism to develop his own unique and influential pictorial language.
Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia and died 2011 in Rome. At a time when the art world was shifting its focus from Paris to New York, Twombly headed in the other direction, moving to Rome in 1957. Here he not only found Mediterranean light but the history, myths, and poetry of antiquity that was to permeate his work on a level of association. Outlines, signs, or fragmentary words infused with the energy found in gestures and scrawls activate his mostly white canvases. These fragmentary traces of personal recollections and collective memories combine to form words and images.
The exhibition focuses on the paintings and sculptures from the 1950s to the 1970s in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel accompanied by exclusive select loans. Together they trace the development of what is arguably Twombly’s most outstanding artistic period. The exhibition will also present Twombly’s painting Untitled, 1969 (Bolsena) for the first time, a gift from Katharina and Wilfrid Steib. The painting’s pencil hatchings describe a window-like opening against a white color field.
Curator: Bernhard Mendes Bürgi
Painting & Sculpture
12 September 2015 – 13 March 2016
The American Cy Twombly was a key member of the new generation of artists to emerge in the 1950s. Like his close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he broke away from American Expressionism to develop his own unique and influential pictorial language.
Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia and died 2011 in Rome. At a time when the art world was shifting its focus from Paris to New York, Twombly headed in the other direction, moving to Rome in 1957. Here he not only found Mediterranean light but the history, myths, and poetry of antiquity that was to permeate his work on a level of association. Outlines, signs, or fragmentary words infused with the energy found in gestures and scrawls activate his mostly white canvases. These fragmentary traces of personal recollections and collective memories combine to form words and images.
The exhibition focuses on the paintings and sculptures from the 1950s to the 1970s in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel accompanied by exclusive select loans. Together they trace the development of what is arguably Twombly’s most outstanding artistic period. The exhibition will also present Twombly’s painting Untitled, 1969 (Bolsena) for the first time, a gift from Katharina and Wilfrid Steib. The painting’s pencil hatchings describe a window-like opening against a white color field.
Curator: Bernhard Mendes Bürgi