Cy Twombly

About

Each painting comprises four wood panels on which three roses in full bloom are depicted in pulsating colours, ranging from deepest burgundy to tangerine, gold, violet and crimson, set against a background of vibrant turquoise. Inscribed on the last panel of each painting are fragments from Rilke's poem cycle "The Roses." Stanzas scrawled in a gestural mode reflect Twombly's characteristic conflation of painting and poetry, image and word, while his brushwork describes petals bursting open, together with words that hint and evoke. He allows the paint to flow down the panels so that liquidity and gravity interact, asserting the vertical passage of the medium over the broad horizontality of the support.

Some aspects of Twombly's new works recall his earlier cycle of paintings, Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985), now in The Menil Collection, Houston, which also referred to quotations by Rilke, as well as Rumi and Giacomo Leopardi, embracing conceptions of nature dominated by its inevitable demise. Twombly's ardent, bold, and often flamboyant use of colour has other affinities -- with Warhol's Flower series, for example, or Matisse's late paper cut-outs. But just as the rose recurs throughout Rilke's work as a memento mori, so does Twombly employ the motifs and conditions of the natural world to allude to the pleasure and transience of life.