Architecture

Cy Twombly at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

BILBAO - Coinciding with Cy Twombly’s eightieth birthday, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present the most important monographic exhibition that any Spanish institution has ever dedicated to this artist—one of the most influential of the latter half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st—from October 28, 2008, to February 15, 2009, organized in collaboration with the Tate Modern in London.

A selection of nearly 100 works, including paintings, sculptures and drawings, will occupy the second floor and one gallery on the first floor, with particular emphasis on the most important thematic series created by the artist over the course of his career. Saving a few exceptions, the works are arranged in chronological order.

This exhibition also emphasizes the museum’s special relationship and commitment to this artist in recent years with the 2007 acquisition of his series Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), the first unitarily conceived series that Cy Twombly has ever designed and around which the exhibit revolves. The curator of the exhibition is Carmen Giménez, a great expert on the artist’s work who was also responsible for organizing Cy Twombly in spring 1987, the first major retrospective of this artist in Spain. The show was curated by Harald Szeemann and presented in the Palacio de Velázquez and the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid while she was director of the National Exhibitions Centre. Previously, in 1986, Cy Twombly was among the artist included in the inaugural exhibition of the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía entitled Referencias: un encuentro artístico en el tiempo (References: An Artistic Encounter in Time), also curated by Carmen Giménez. Later on, in autumn 1987, the exhibition of La Colección Sonnabend (The Sonnabend Collection), curated by Jean Louis Froment at the same museum also included a significant representation of the artist’s work.

The presentation of the works that comprise this unique monographic show establishes an interesting dialogue with the unmistakable architecture of Frank Gehry’s building, whose curving galleries and great fanlights bring out the strength of Twombly’s work and the rich tonalities and textures of his paintings and sculptures.

via Artdaily.org

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