Cy Twombly a Los Angeles

 

Gli spazi della galleria Gagosian di Beverly Hills ospitano una stupenda mostra su Cy Twombly. 

CS

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Cy Twombly, organized in association with the Cy Twombly Foundation. Marking the first appearance of the artist’s work at the Beverly Hills gallery since Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings in 2012, it gathers art produced in the final decade of Twombly’s life.

Gagosian’s exhibition coincides with Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, at the J. Paul Getty Museum from August 2 through October 30, 2022. The first institutional presentation in Los Angeles dedicated to the artist in nearly three decades, Making Past Present explores Twombly’s engagement with the art, culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean, and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2023.

Working in Gaeta, Italy, and Lexington, Virginia, Twombly returned to painting at a large scale in the 2000s. The shift followed his 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the critical success of Lepanto, a suite of twelve paintings first shown at the 49th Biennale di Venezia in 2001. In these works, he adopted a new approach to color with palettes of lush, saturated hues. Slender lines and loops of paint balance expressive dynamism and elegance, while denser strokes evoke the petals of peonies and chrysanthemums. The paintings are imbued with the uninhibited spirit of Bacchanalia and the vivacity of fresh blossoms; at once vital and elegiac, they meditate on poetry, history, and myth.

One highlight is a set of six panels composed with verdant greens and luminous white, Untitled I–VI (Green Painting) (2002–03), which was presented only once before as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Made Visible. Also included are Twombly’s works on paper, which blur the distinctions between painting, drawing, and writing, and his sculptures, which extend his concerns with geometry, gesture, and materiality into three dimensions. Assembled from plaster, wood, and scraps found in his studio, these objects suggest fragments of the monumental architectonic and sculptural forms of ancient Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Twombly often painted the sculptures white or cast them in bronze, unifying their disparate forms while retaining the tactility of their surfaces.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with a conversation on Twombly between artists Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu.

Gagosian Gallery 20 years!

below English

La Gagosian Gallery di Beverly Hills in North Camden Drive festeggia i vent'anni di attività con una grande collettiva dei suoi artisti più famosi, che attraversano tutto il novecento artistico. 

Si inizia con i primi artisti esposti, che nei lontani anni ottanta furono J.M.Basquiat e C.Burden, per passare poi ad artisti storici come A.Calder o J.Johns e giungere ora a R.Stingel o T.Houseago.

English 

To mark the twentieth anniversary of Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills on North Camden Drive, founder Larry Gagosian has selected a special exhibition of works by more than thirty artists spanning three generations.

Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Chris Burden and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among the first artists to be exhibited. Drawing on the city's abundance of talented artists, Gagosian was at the forefront of developing a bicoastal model for contemporary art galleries—the beginning of a global expansion that now numbers fifteen galleries in three continents—when he moved to New York in 1985 and opened his first gallery there, in collaboration with Leo Castelli.

Los Angeles provided both artists and galleries with an ideal infrastructure for creating and exhibiting diverse bodies of artwork, sometimes on a very large scale, and in 1995 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened with new sculptures by Frank Stella. A major exhibition in homage to Castelli’s legendary gallery followed, which brought together works by artists including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Bruce Nauman. The program continued to evolve with a survey of Basquiat’s paintings and drawings (1998); Lichtenstein’s Nudes(1998); Andy Warhol’s iconic Camouflage Paintings (1999); and Alexander Calder’s Mobiles (2003), among many other exhibitions.

In 2010, the expansion of the Beverly Hills gallery into the next-door building to create a second light-filled space of equal scale—again designed by Meier—enabled even more ambitious programming, with major exhibitions by Urs Fischer, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Taryn Simon, among others. The career-spanning survey “Avedon: Women” (2013) was the first exhibition of Richard Avedon's photography in Los Angeles since 1976.

At Gagosian's much-anticipated “Oscar show,” an annual fixture in the Los Angeles cultural calendar, the art, film, and celebrity communities rub shoulders prior to the Academy Awards ceremony. To date, these include Cindy Sherman’s photographic self-portraits (2000); Richard Prince’s Check Paintings (2005); Andreas Gursky’s Ocean photographs (2010); Ed Ruscha’sPsycho Spaghetti Western still-life landscape paintings (2011); Urs Fischer’s dramatic and droll sculptural installations (2012); and, most recently, John Currin’s oil paintings of perverse libertine fantasies (2015).

From Damien Hirst’s black-sheep vitrine (2009) to Robert Therrien’s enigmatic No title (blue bow) (2015) to Nancy Rubins’s sculptural graphite Drawing (2015) to other new works by Thomas Houseago, Sterling Ruby, Rudolf Stingel, and some of more than thirty participating artists, the twentieth anniversary exhibition celebrates the gallery's richly diverse international program in the city where it all began.

#20YearAnniversary  #GagosianBeverlyHills