Cy Twombly – All is visible and all elusive

Cy Twombly began photographing in 1951, initially in black and white, as a student at the renowned ›Black Mountain College‹, which he attended together with Robert Rauschenberg. It is a form of art, which he never gave up. However, it was not until several decades later that Twombly’s photographs found recognition in public exhibitions and publications.

Since 1972, Twombly used a Polaroid camera SX-70. High-quality prints were produced in the Atelier Fresson in Savigny-sur-Orge near Paris, enlarged in small editions on soft, matt paper.

Today, we regard Twombly’s photographs as a new form of sensuality of the observed world. The topoi of the photographs touch on everyday events, the reflections of changing seasons throughout the year, motifs from Twombly’s homes in Gaeta by the sea in southern Italy and Lexington, Virginia, images from the painter’s studio, details of paintings, and fragments of sculptures.

What all these still photographs touch upon is the poeticized nature and its intrinsicality as a parable and metamorphosis. In some of these forms, which magically transform an object in a close-up as they ›draw‹ the distilled light on it, we are met with the evocation of reading a Haiku poem. The floral motifs and the blooms are entangled in cyphers of summer, images, and moments reminiscing the poet’s garden depicted by Marcel Proust.

»All is visible and all elusive« is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at Bastian Gallery. Cy Twombly’s photographs can be found in numerous important private and institutional collections and have been shown in recent years in solo exhibitions at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, the Sursock Museum, Beirut, the Château La Coste in Le Puy- Sainte-Réparade and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech.

Title from the poem »Between going and staying« from Octavio Paz