Cy Twombly: The Last Paintings & A Survey of Photographs 1954-2011

If commemorative perfection exists, the Gagosian Gallery's tribute show to Cy Twombly surely approaches the standard. Released from an exhaustive retrospective, we are welcomed on two compact visual journeys that both remind and introduce us to the brilliance of the artist's life and work: one through his last major series of paintings and another through a collection of lesser known photographs taken by Twombly over the past sixty years. While the Last Paintings are as grandiose in their abstract expressionism as one would imagine, the photographs uncover a rather enthralling glimpse into Twombly's life, mind, and process as an artist. Preconceived thoughts dissipate upon entrance into the narrative.

Revealed in the photographs is an unmatchable creative impulse with the ability to catch and play with fleeting instances of immeasurable beauty. Twombly extracted exceptionality from seemingly unremarkable subjects such as flowers, undefined spaces, and indecipherable objects by repeatedly capturing them with an ever curious, ever moving lens, much like the strokes of his paintings. A quite intimacy ensues and exposed is a thread of resilient ephemerality living within this work that delivers to us the rousing value of spontaneity, ultimately evoking him as master of the moment: both of the haze and clarity of the ones past and the rise and fall of the ones present.

In contrast to the divulging Survey of Photographs, the overpowering vibrance of The Last Paintings (which align very much with Twombly's body of work) provide us little farewell or solution, but appropriately cry to us the thrill, misery, power, complexity and simplicity of a creative life. The disparity fulfills the need for explanation and a cliff hanger.