Cy Twombly: Photographs

Opening reception: Thursday 29 March 2018 from 18:00 to 21:00.

The Sursock Museum is proud to present, for the first time in Lebanon, an exhibition of photographs by Cy Twombly.

The exhibition comprises of thirty photographs of subjects including intimate spaces, landscapes, and natural subjects, taken between 1985 and 2008.

From his days as a student at Black Mountain College during the early 1950s until his death in 2011 at the age of 83, Twombly captured his daily life in photographs. He recorded the verdant landscapes of Virginia and the coasts of Italy; close-up details of ancient buildings and sculptures; studio interiors; and still lifes of objects and flowers.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Twombly used specialized copiers to enlarge his Polaroid images on matte paper, resulting in subtle distortions that approximate the timeless qualities of his paintings and sculptures with their historical and literary allusions.

Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia and died in Italy in 2011. 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 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery opened at The Menil Collection, Houston, exhibiting works by Twombly since 1954. Recent institutional exhibitions include Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern, London (2008); Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000–2007, Art Institute of Chicago (2009); Sensations of the Moment, MUMOK, Vienna (2009); 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); Cy Twombly: Paradise, Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (2015); and Cy Twombly, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2017).

Exhibition guide

Download the bilingual (Arabic-English) exhibition guide here.