Divine Dialogues: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity
May 25 – September 3, 2017
Museum of Cycladic Art (MCA), Athens

From the press release

For the first time, thirty works by Cy Twombly inspired by Greek mythology and his close ties with Greece are presented alongside twelve ancient artworks, revealing a unique and original dialogue between ancient Greek and contemporary art.

Cy Twombly‘s fascination with Greece is well known. Even though he first visited the country during the summer of 1960, Greek mythology takes an important place in his oeuvre already since the late 1950s. But it was only in the 1970s that he explored the Greek history and mythology in depth, culminating with his masterpiece, the cycle Fifty Days at Illiam (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Cy painted this work over the summers of 1977 and 1978 in his studio in Bassano in Teverina, north of Rome. Twombly’s response to that decade’s disdain for painting was to transform it into writing, as in the famous large drawings Venus and Apollo, 1975 or the later, monumental Orpheus drawings, 1979. In his artworks -both in drawings and sculptures- he frequently alluded to the Olympian gods, from the major figures of Aphrodite, Apollo and Dionysus, to Nike, Pan, or Aristaeus. A special place at the very core of the exhibition holds an unexpected visitor: the famous François Vase, also known as the Kleitias and Ergotimos Krater, a milestone in the development of ancient Greek pottery and vase painting, which travels for the first time outside Italy, from the Archaeological Museum of Florence. It has been said that the François Vase is so unique that, even if all other ancient Greek vases were lost, it alone could illustrate Greek mythology and the code of Archaic Greek art.

The exhibition is curated by Professor Nikolaos Stampolidis, Director of the Museum of Cycladic Art and Jonas Storsve, Curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and [Curator] of the major Cy Twombly retrospective exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Nicholaos Chr. Stampolidis, and Jonas Storsve.

For further information:
Museum of Cycladic Art (MCA), Athens
cycladic.gr