Cy Twombly: Sculpture was presented at Gagosian's Grosvenor Hill gallery, organized in association with the Cy Twombly Foundation. The first exhibition in London devoted exclusively to Twombly's three-dimensional work, it coincided with the publication of the second volume of the Catalogue Raisonné of Sculptures, edited by Nicola Del Roscio, and published by Schirmer/Mosel. Twenty-three works spanning from 1977 to 2009 traced the full maturity of a sculptural practice that Twombly began in 1946.

The exhibition took as its opening provocation the artist's own formulation: "White paint is my marble." Twombly coated the majority of his assembled sculptures in white house paint, a layer that neutralized the disparateness of found wood, plaster, and iron while binding them into coherent, unified objects. The accumulation of paint was neither finish nor disguise but a condition of the work's coherence—evoking classical marble while refusing its associations with perfection and permanence through surfaces that were resolutely rough, worked by hand, and alive to accident.

The assembled objects registered, in material form, Twombly's lifelong habit of gathering from the world around him. Del Roscio, in a conversation with Nicholas Serota and Mark Francis published in the exhibition catalogue, recalled finding objects in the street for Twombly, who would sometimes incorporate them and sometimes say, "That's nothing, throw it away." This instinct had been sharpened, in the early 1950s, by formative travels through North Africa and southern Europe with Robert Rauschenberg, during which the two artists encountered objects of devotion and antiquity—at archaeological sites, formal gardens, and ethnographic museums in Rome—that left lasting traces in Twombly's sculptural imagination. Several sculptures bore handwritten inscriptions scrawled in Twombly's characteristic graffiti-like hand, situating the three-dimensional object as a kind of monument—not illustrative of the poem but continuous with it.

Taken together, Cy Twombly: Sculpture articulated a practice that reflected a private relationship between artist and object inseparable from memory, landscape, and antiquity. By situating these works alongside the completion of the Catalogue Raisonné, the exhibition placed the sculptures within a scholarly framework equal to that long established for the paintings and works on paper.

Gagosian published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition. It features a conversation between Nicola Del Roscio, Mark Francis, and Nicholas Serota.


For further information:
Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London
gagosian.com