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december 16, 2015 - Kunsmuseum Basel
Cy Twombly — Painting & Sculpture at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
The #kunstmuseumbasel presents works by the American artist #cytwombly in an exhibition that will be on view at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst from September 12, 2015 until March 13, 2016. The show focuses on paintings created between the 1950s and the 1970s from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s own collection, complemented by works on loan from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and the Daros Collection. Untitled (1969), a portrait-format painting Katharina and Wilfrid Steib donated to the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection in 2013, will make its public première in #basel.
With his close friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the American artist #cytwombly ranks among the leading exponents of a generation of artists who broke away from abstract expressionism in the 1950s to devise their own distinctive and highly influential visual idioms. Twombly was born in Lexington, Va., in 1928 and died in Rome in 2011. In 1957, at a time when the center of the art world was shifting from Paris to New York, Twombly moved in the opposite direction, settling down in Rome. There he found the light of the Mediterranean world as well as the history, myths, and poetry of antiquity that subsequently entered his oeu- vre as a web of associations. With a gestural impetus, he activates usually white pictorial sur- faces with letter-like scrawls: lines, symbols, and fragments of words—traces of personal recollection and collective memory manifested in a fusion of writing and image.
The exhibition turns the spotlight on paintings created between the 1950s and the 1970s from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection, complemented by loans from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and the Daros Collection, which holds a set of outstanding works by Twombly. The exemplary selection traces the creative evolution in the artist’s early oeuvre, beginning with a painting in a fairly intimate format, Untitled, that dates from 1954, before he left New York: Twombly’s roots in abstract expressionism are evident in the compact physicality of the paint and the gestural brushwork. In the pictures he paints starting in 1957—the majority are created in Rome—he stays faithful to these roots, but the dark grounds give way to luminous surfaces in large and wide formats structured by expansively rhythmical linear markings in pencil, crayon, or oil. These works would seem to bear witness to a psychological state the artist experienced as he worked on them; when he subsequently revised them, striking out elements or painting over them, the discarded forms remained visible. The overall impression is one of ambivalence between revelation and mystification.
The portrait-format painting Untitled, which was created near Lago di Bolsena north of Rome in 1969, is presented to the public for the first time. Pencil hatchings subtly suggest an aperture, perhaps a window, amid a white color field. The work, whose donation to the #kunstmuseumbasel by Katharina and Wilfrid Steib in 2013 provided a welcome occasion for the exhibition, ideally complements the museum’s existing eminent collection of Cy Twombly’s art, as the show demonstrates to great effect. The preface to the exhibition brochure outlines the collec- tion’s history.
The exhibition, which is designed by curator Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, will open at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst on September 11, 2015, at 6:30pm. The #event is open to the public; ad- mission is free. The exhibition is made possible by support from the Stiftung für das Kun- stmuseum #basel and the Isaac Dreyfus-Bernheim Stiftung.
Courtesy of the Fonds für künstlerische Aktivitäten im Museum für Gegenwartskunst der Ema- nuel Hoffmann-Stiftung und der Christoph Merian Stiftung, all visitors enjoy free admission to the Museum für Gegenwartskunst until the end of the year. For more than twenty years, the Fonds has steadily supported the Museum für Gegenwartskunst’s exhibition programming; during the closure of the Kunstmuseum, this extraordinarily generous gesture is intended to invite the people of #basel and the surrounding region as well as visitors to the city to discover the museum on the Rhine and explore its offerings.
Cy Twombly—Painting & Sculpture
Museum für Gegenwartskunst #basel, September 12, 2015–March 13, 2016
Curator: Bernhard Mendes Bürgi
www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
01 Twombly Untitled 1954 New York City
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02 Twombly Arcadia 1958 Roma Daros
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03 Twombly Untitled 1959 Roma DAROS
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04 Twombly Study for Presence of a Myth 1959 Roma
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05 Twombly Untitled 1961 Roma
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06 Twombly Untitled 1969 Bolsena EHS
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07 Untitled 1969 Bolsena KuMu
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08 Twombly Nini's Painting 1971 Roma
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09 Twombly Untitled 1985 Gaeta
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10 Twombly Thicket of Ur 1990 1999 Gaeta
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Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst (MGK)
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Museum für Gegenwartskunst
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