This exhibition catalogue includes a brief essay by Kate Nesin entitled “Eight Sculptures, Eight Bronzes” along with color reproductions of artworks and a list of works exhibited. The eight sculptures included in the exhibition were all executed in 2009. Nesin structures her essay with and around Frank O’Hara’s characterization of Twombly’s sculptures as “witty and funereal,” arguing that “knowingness is always coincident, in Twombly, with a remarkable sincerity” (5). She frames Twombly’s practice as a series of apparently diametrically opposed characteristics, writing that “the important—and uncommon—thing is that these oppositions operate not in order to provide tension but in order to suspend it…Complete and unfixed” (5). She links Twombly’s sculptures to Iranian funerial bronzes from the Zagros Mountains, the earliest known sculptures of their kind, and offers reflections on the material qualities of the bronze used in the 2009 sculptures, concluding that “bronze’s truth may lie in its potential for truth to other materials” (6). The material acts, for Nesin, as an “accurate copyist…as the details of another body are apprehended and expressed,” engaging in a constant “encounter between ‘copy’ and ‘original’” (6). Nesin contextualizes these late sculptures, produced only two years before the artist’s passing, relative to his earliest resin-cast sculptures, produced in 1977, and bronze-cast sculptures, produced in 1979. She writes that Twombly is “ever thoughtful about the conventions of Sculpture…the multipart original persists, as indexical registration, as part of how bronzes are made” (7). She discusses the longer duration of Twombly’s engagement with sculptures such as Untitled (The Mathematical Dream of Ashurbanipal), photographed in 1999 and cast in bronze in 2009. Asking “what does it mean for materiality to mean?” (7), Nesin concludes that “Twombly would seem to encourage our attention to the materiality of these most recent bronze surfaces—to what is their own and what is taken or adheres from elsewhere” (7).

For further discussion of Twombly’s sculptures, see especially Kate Nesin’s Cy Twombly’s Things (2014), Achim Hochdörfer’s Cy Twombly: Das Skulpturale Werk (2001), and Katharina Schmidt’s Cy Twombly: Die Skulptur / The Sculpture (2000). Additional exhibition catalogues concerning Twombly’s sculptural practice include Cy Twombly: Sculpture, published by Gagosian Gallery (2019), Cy Twombly: Sculptures 1992–2005, published by the Alte Pinakothek München and Schirmer/Mosel (2006), and Cy Twombly: Ten Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (1997).

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures at Gagosian Gallery Madison Avenue, New York (September 15 – December 23, 2009).

Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures. Text by Kate Nesin. Published by Gagosian Gallery, 2009; 56 pages; fully illustrated. English edition.