This exhibition at Gagosian brought together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper produced during the final decade of Cy Twombly’s life. Organized in association with the Cy Twombly Foundation, it marked the artist’s first presentation at the Beverly Hills gallery since Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings in 2012 and coincided with Making Past Present: Cy Twombly at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition later traveled to Gagosian in New York.

Working between Gaeta, Italy, and Lexington, Virginia, Twombly returned to large-scale painting in the early 2000s, following his 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and the critical reception of Lepanto, first shown at the 49th Biennale di Venezia in 2001. The works presented here reflect this late shift, characterized by saturated color, expansive gesture, and a renewed engagement with myth, poetry, and history. Slender loops and linear passages move across the surface with rhythmic insistence, while denser strokes suggest vegetal forms—petals, stems, and blossoms—at once lush and fugitive.

A key work in the exhibition was Untitled I–VI (Green Painting) (2002–03), a suite of six panels composed in verdant greens and luminous white. Previously shown only once, as part of Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2016, the group underscored Twombly’s late exploration of seriality, variation, and chromatic depth.

As part of Sessions, a performance series associated with Gagosian Premieres, musician and composer Isabella Summers performed To Neptune, Ruler of the Seas Profound, a multi-part work composed and recorded in 2019 in response to Twombly’s life and art. The musical composition first played through headphones on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly: Sculpture at Gagosian in London, it was later arranged for orchestra for the live performance at Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome as a part of the first edition of the project Un/veiled in May 2022 and further expanded for a second live performance at Gagosian in Los Angeles. Interwoven with texts by Homer, Stéphane Mallarmé, and William Butler Yeats—writers central to Twombly’s literary imagination—the piece introduced a temporal, auditory dimension to the exhibition, echoing the artist’s long-standing engagement with poetry as a structuring force.

Taken together, the exhibition presented Twombly’s late work as a sustained period of experimentation marked by intensity, lyricism, and resolve.

Gagosian published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. It features a conversation between Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu.

Learn more about the origin of the musical project by Isabella Summers dedicated to Cy Twombly, listening the audio conversation between the musician and Tatiana Cheneviere—curator of the project— in the In Perspective dedicated episode.

For further information:
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
gagosian.com