This volume includes, in Italian and in English: Ugo Collu, “Premessa” (“Introduction”); Achim Hochdörfer’s “Il ‘bricolage’ come strategia di spiazzamento,” (“The ‘bricolage’ as a strategy of displacement”; Francesca Pola, “Apparati” (“Apparatus Criticus”); reproductions of artworks, chronology, list of exhibitions, and bibliography. The exhibition and volume both followed the Nivola Foundation’s award of the “Premio Nivola alla carriera” to Twombly.

Collu’s introduction lauds the merits of Twombly’s work and offers a summation of the jury’s reasoning for selecting Twombly for the award. He asserts that what Twombly’s sculptures offer is “a fresh impulse to the quest for a new freedom, the search for the lost horizon within which reconnecting the ‘stumps’ of a neurotic humanity to its forgotten "Dionisyan" roots may actually become a possibility” (9).

Hochdörfer’s essay focuses on the following subjects: “the ‘poetization’ of Twombly’s sculpture in Europe” (22), the history of exhibition and reception of Twombly’s sculptures, Twombly’s disruption of apparently transcendent effects, the appropriateness of Roland Barthes’s writings on Twombly for understanding the sculptures, and recurrent motifs in the sculptures. Höchdorfer draws connections to Paul Valéry and Stéphane Mallarmé—as well as, more unusually, to Michel Foucault and heterotopy—and emphasizes the limitations of purely aestheticizing readings of the sculptures. He offers an extended reading of Twombly’s Untitled (1953) sculpture of overpainted reed pipes, writing in a representative characterization that “Twombly eschews any trace of elegance; the lofty tones of poetry are avoided. The hidden charm of the sculpture resides above all in its closed, hard nature, in an almost aggressively non-virtuoso thrust” (21). He identifies specific referents for various sculptures, e.g., connecting Twombly’s Victory (1987) to the Nike of Samothrace (approx. 190 BCE).

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: Eight Sculptures, published by Gagosian Gallery (2009), 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. Sculture at EXMÁ, Centro d’Arte e Cultura, Cagliari (November 6 – December 8, 2002).

Cy Twombly. Sculture. Text by Achim Hochdörfer. Published by Ilisso Edizioni, Nuoro, 2002. 110 pages. Fully illustrated. Italian/English edition.