Gagosian moves to a new premises at Grosvenor Hill, Mayfair in October to tie in with London’s Frieze Week. The exhibition will include large scale unseen Bacchus paintings, which Twombly retained in his studio, as well as loans from other collections. It is organized in collaboration with the Cy Twombly Foundation.
Twombly’s enduring importance to the art of the present is attested to by the many recent survey exhibitions in leading international museums. He has been a cornerstone of Gagosian Gallery since it opened in New York in the 1980s. Gallery exhibitions of his work presented over the last twenty-five years include “Bolsena Paintings” (1989–90) and “The Coronation of Sesostris” (2000–01), to “Lepanto” (2002), “Bacchus” (2005–06), and “The Rose” (2009).
Throughout this period, Twombly inaugurated several Gagosian galleries with exhibitions of new work — “Ten Paintings and a Sculpture” (London, 2004), “Three Notes for Salalah” (Rome, 2007–08), “Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves” (Athens, 2009), and “Camino Real” (Paris, 2010). “The Last Paintings” and “Photographs” toured Gagosian Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, and New York in 2012.
Designed by award-winning architects Caruso St. John, who were also responsible for Gagosian Britannia Street and Gagosian galleries in Rome and Paris, the new gallery – the third in London — features large double-height daylit spaces, and is located in Grosvenor Hill, above Berkeley Square, between Davies Street and New Bond Street.
Larry Gagosian comments, “It was a tremendous honor that Cy Twombly inaugurated so many of our European galleries with exhibitions of new work. In keeping with this tradition, we are excited to be able to show several previously unseen works as the opening exhibition at the Grosvenor Hill gallery. We are proud to do this in collaboration with the Cy Twombly Foundation.”
A fully illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition with an essay by Briony Fer.
Cy Twombly (1928–2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1947–49); the Art Students League, New York (1950-51); and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1951–52). In the mid-1950s, following travels in Europe and Africa, he emerged as a prominent figure among a group of artists working in New York that included Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Major retrospectives were held at the Whitney Museum (1979); Kunsthaus Zürich (1987, traveled to Madrid, London, Düsseldorf, and Paris); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994, traveled to Houston, Los Angeles, and Berlin). In 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery opened at The Menil Collection, Houston, exhibiting works by Twombly since 1954. The European retrospective “Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons” opened at Tate Modern, London in 2008 and traveled to Bilbao and Rome. “Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007,” Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and “Sensations of the Moment,” MUMOK, Vienna (2009) were important surveys. In 2010, his permanent site-specific painting Ceiling was unveiled in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre. At the same time he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by the French government. Twombly died in Italy in 2011.
Selected recent exhibitions include “Cy Twombly: Sculpture,” Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); “Cy Twombly Photographs 1951–2010,” Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2011); “Cy Twombly: Sculptures,” Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013); “Cy Twombly: Paradise,” Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014); “Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil,” The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2014); and “Cy Twombly: Paradise,” at Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (2015).