Cy Twombly – Forms and Shades

Ever since his first retrospective in 1979 at the Whitney Museum in New York and the subsequent exhibitions at the MoMA and in Berlin in 1994, the Venice Biennales, the museum solo shows in Zurich, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris, Cy Twombly’s works are considered to belong to the outstanding works of the second half of the twentieth century.

Cy Twombly’s photographic oeuvre began already when he was a student at Black Mountain College; it was publicly exhibited for the first time in 1993. In recent years, it has found its way to a larger public: exhibitions in London, New York, and Los Angeles, Rome, and Munich, as well as several comprehensive publications, have familiarised us with these remarkable photographs.

Landscapes and seascapes, studio scenes, still lifes, flowers and blossoms; testimony of moments when the conflict between nature and culture seems suspended, moments that transform a subject’s inconspicuous material physiognomy into a lyrical image. Twombly’s subject, the fragment, seems weightless. The artist enlarged his pictures of blurriness, taken with an instant camera, and printed them in an extraordinary dry print process on matte paper. Twombly’s still photographs touch a poeticised Mediterranean nature, its essence revealed in light and shadow, its becoming and passing in the changing seasons.