Cy Twombly

Thomas Ammann Fine Art, AG, Zurich
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2011

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures, September - October 2009, pp. 31 and 33, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
New York, Dominique Lévy, Audible Presence: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Cy Twombly, September - November 2013

Kate Nesin, Cy Twombly's Things, 2014, New Haven and London, fig. 72, p. 188, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)

This sculpture is in excellent condition and appears structurally sound. It is accompanied by a wooden base that exhibits evidence of wear at its top, which is a result of past installation and de-installation of the sculpture.
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“Twombly’s sculptures exist outside the real-time and on-going metamorphosis of his two dimensional work… they inform, and are informed by, his paintings and drawings, providing a constant distillation of his sensibility, one that is full of keys and signals.”

Roberta Smith, “The Great Mediator” in Harold Szeeman, Cy Twombly, Munich, 1987, p. 20

 

With acute attention to the formal laws of balance and geometric harmony, Cy Twombly’s majestically serene Untitled (Zurich) stands at the apogee of the contemporary master’s sculptural achievements. As homage to his modernist forbearers it shows the artist at his most minimal within the sculptural field, perfectly deploying a discrete pairing of seemingly weightless yet firmly grounded forms to construct a serene monument that is both aged and refreshingly modern. As an oblique yet intimate totem endowed with both classical grace and shamanistic charisma it invites our veneration through stilled contemplation. Cast in 2009, this elegant bronze work represents the confidence and versatility of Twombly’s aesthetic vision, serving as a testament to the art of sculpture and to the innate poetry of the medium.

Composed of three simple yet edifying shapes, the eye is drawn up from the cylindrical base to successive cuboid tiers that exploit the micro-architectural dimensions of sculpture, referencing both a plinth and a tower.  In this sense the piece looks back to Twombly’s earlier series of Rome sculptures created in 1976-1977. Evocative of classical columns and consisting of two tiers, these works once again pronounce Twombly’s endless fascination with the ancient world and the city which he came to call home from 1957 – his eternal muse. Through its inherent monumentality and placid monochromatic coloration, Untitled (Zurich) remains deep within Twombly’s psychic realm of the Latin myth. Simultaneously its title looks beyond the Alps and designates it as a Northern European counterpart to the classical Roman works. In contrast to the sensuous curve of a cylindrical support we face a tectonically variegated construction reminiscent of church spires.

Whilst Twombly’s earlier sculptures utilized ephemeral materials such as cardboard, cloth, wood and house paint, the fragility of such components urged his transition to casting in bronze in the early 1980s. Making the forms inherently more durable, Twombly described the process of casting as an effort to "unify the thing. It abstracts the forms from the material. People want to know about what the material constituents are; it helps them identify the work with something. But I want each sculpture to be seen as a whole, as a sculpture." (the artist cited in David Sylvester, "The World is Light," in Nicola del Roscio ed., Writings on Twombly, Munich, 2002, p. 276) Beyond this, the passage to bronze also emulated the practice of Greek and Roman artists and furthered his link to antiquity. The most striking feature which binds all of the artist’s sculptures is the use of the stark white patina that adorns the radiant surface with the striking power of the Mediterranean sun. We are summoned to visualize the bleached ground and architecture of a timelessly archaic realm of archeological mystery; we encounter a lost relic, rediscovered in a weathered state yet perfected in its fragmentary form as a talismanic pointer to a distant history. 

Stemming from a lineage of beautifully sparse works that play off against the organic spontaneity of other sculptures in Twombly’s sculptural corpus, the present work is supremely weighted and lends a stasis to its surrounds. Nevertheless, it maintains an idiosyncratic delicacy and paradoxical sense of ethereality that is traceable throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Binding Untitled (Zurich) further to his most celebrated works, the cascading white paint not only nostalgically evokes decay but chimes with the structure’s determined verticality to create a sense of rise and fall; a sense of interminable looping. This sublime abstract bronze corroborates many histories across its stunning surface. Much like the regenerated flow of water from a fountain, it forms part of an enduring system in which the enigmatic draw of the past resurfaces continually, uprooting fresh permutations of beauty with each cycle.