Installation view
Artwork, left to right: © Cy Twombly Foundation; © 2012 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork, front left and right: © Cy Twombly Foundation; center back: © 2012 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork, front to back: © 2012 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork © Archiv Franz West and © Estate Franz West. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork © Archiv Franz West and © Estate Franz West. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork, front to back: © 2012 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork, front and back: © 2012 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; center: © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork © Archiv Franz West and © Estate Franz West. Photo: Martin Wong
Installation view
Artwork, front to back: © 2012 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Archiv Franz West and © Estate Franz West. Photo: Martin Wong
John Chamberlain
GOOSECAKEWALK, 2009
Painted and chrome-plated steel, 82 ½ × 45 ½ × 32 ½ inches (209.6 × 115.6 × 82.6 cm)
© Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Mike Bruce
Gagosian Hong Kong is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture by game-changers of postwar American art John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, together with recent work by the irrepressible Austrian sculptor Franz West. Each of these artists, in ways befitting their respective contexts, has sought inspiration from found materials and everyday life.
One of the most inventive artists in postwar American art, Rauschenberg worked in “the gap between life and art” to develop an altogether new visual language based on collage as a microcosm of the larger, messy world. Walking the streets of New York, he picked up trash and discarded objects that interested him, integrating them into bold paintings or assembling freestanding sculptures. These he called, simply yet paradigmatically, “combines.” The Gluts series (1986–95) are a direct comment on surplus in the 1980s Texan oil market as well as the widely fabled material greed and excess of the era. Exploring the reflective, textural, sculptural, and thematic possibilities of road signs and scrap automobile parts he assembled wall reliefs such as Bumper Slip Late Summer Glut (1987) and Splice Early Winter Glut (1987). Thus transformed into powerful aesthetic objects, these junkyard relics yet retain some of their original, non-abstract identity. Hoax Summer Glut (1987), a rare freestanding sculpture of the primarily wall-based series, proposes a more overt narrative with a battered construction helmet, and a dramatically balanced swathe of industrial mesh.
Rauschenberg’s friend and sometime collaborator Twombly began making sculptures in 1946. In contrast to the gritty exuberance of Rauschenberg’s sculptures, his bricolages are rather more austere and elegiac. Taking humble materials and found objects, he coated them in chalky white gesso, producing totemic sculptures possessed of an almost archaeological beauty, with a refined play between fragility and obduracy, ancient and modern, epic and everyday. In 1979 Twombly began casting some of these bricolages in bronze, thus transforming and preserving the tenuous forms into cohesive and more robust wholes. While discrete sculptural elements are often partially merged and abstracted by the casting process, in the vertical Untitled (2004–09) each remains clearly visible; a broom inside a funnel resting on a cylindrical pedestal.
In conjunction with Franz West: Papier, the gallery’s presentation of paper-based works by Franz West at Frieze Masters 2023, artist Oscar Murillo and arts writer, critic, and broadcaster Ben Luke sit down to discuss Murillo’s collaboration in selecting the works on view, as well as his personal experiences meeting the late artist in London.
Eleonora Di Erasmo, cocurator of Un/veiled: Cy Twombly, Music, Inspirations, a program of concerts, video screenings, and works by Cy Twombly at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Rome, reflects on the resonances and networks of inspiration between the artist and music. The program was the result of an extensive three-year study, done at the behest of Nicola Del Roscio in the Rome and Gaeta offices of the Cy Twombly Foundation, intended to collect, document, and preserve compositions by musicians around the world who have been inspired by Twombly’s work, or to establish an artistic dialogue with them.
In 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced their plan for a survey of Cy Twombly’s artwork alongside selections from their permanent ancient Greek and Roman collection. The survey was postponed due to the lockdowns necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, but was revived in 2022 with a presentation at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from August 2 through October 30. In 2023, the exhibition will arrive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The curator for the exhibition, Christine Kondoleon, and Kate Nesin, author of Cy Twombly’s Things (2014) and advisor for the show, speak with Gagosian director Mark Francis about the origin of the exhibition and the aesthetic and poetic resonances that give the show its title: Making Past Present.
Thierry Greub tracks the literary references in Cy Twombly’s epic painting of 1994.
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Anne Boyer, the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry, composes a poem in response to Twombly’s Aristaeus Mourning the Loss of His Bees (1973) and introduces a portfolio of the painter’s works accompanied by the poems that inspired them.
The Spring 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Gerhard Richter’s Helen (1963) on its cover.
Catalyzed by the exhibition Crushed, Cast, Constructed: Sculpture by John Chamberlain, Urs Fischer, and Charles Ray, Alice Godwin examines the legacy and development of a Surrealist ethos in selected works from three contemporary sculptors.
Bobbie Sheng explores the symbiotic relationship between the poet and visual artists of his time and tracks the enduring influence of his poetry on artists working today.
The Summer 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.
London’s River Café, a culinary mecca perched on a bend in the River Thames, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2018. To celebrate this milestone and the publication of her cookbook River Café London, cofounder Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the famed restaurant’s allure.
The two artists discuss being drawn to difficult subjects, the effects of motherhood on their practice, embracing chance, and their shared adoration of Cy Twombly.
The Fall 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Sinking (2019) by Nathaniel Mary Quinn on its cover.
Paul Goldberger tracks the evolution of Mitchell and Emily Rales’s Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Set amid 230 acres of pristine landscape and housing a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art, this graceful complex of pavilions, designed by architects Thomas Phifer and Partners, opened to the public in the fall of 2018.
Mark Francis, director of the exhibition Cy Twombly: In Beauty it is finished, Drawings 1951–2008, describes the impetus for this expansive presentation, the source for its title, and details the stories of some of the works on view.
Cy Twombly’s Coronation of Sesostris (2000) receives a closer look by Gagosian Director, Mark Francis. In this video, he discusses the history of the work, the myths and poetry embedded within it, and considers its lasting impact.
In Foil Adventures: John Chamberlain’s Late Works in Aluminum, Corinna Thierolf discusses how, starting in the mid-1960s, the artist investigated and perfected working with this material.
The Spring 2018 Gagosian Quarterly with a cover by Ed Ruscha is now available for order.
Katharina Grosse reflects on the work of Cy Twombly.
Olivier Berggruen and Mary Jacobus spoke about the works in the inaugural exhibition at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill outpost.
