ATHENS – The Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (MCA) announces the exhibition “DIVINE DIALOGUES: Cy Twombly and Greek Antiquity”, from 25 May to 3 September.
The exhibition showcases ancient artefacts side by side with works by contemporary American artist Cy Twombly and is made possible thanks to the kind support of the Cy Twombly foundation.
For the first time, 27works byCy Twombly inspired by Greek mythology and his close ties with Greece will be presentedalongside 12 ancient artworks, revealing a unique and original dialogue between ancient Greek and contemporary art.
The exhibition includes representativedrawings and sculptures by the contemporary artist,such as Venus (1975), Pan (1975), Nike (1980), Apollo (1975), Dionysus (1975), Orpheus(1979), Aristaeus mourning the loss of his bees (1973) andAphrodite Anadyomene (1979).
These works will “converse” with a series of ancient artworks such as the Torso of Aphrodite Anadyomenefrom the Archaeological Museum of Paphos, the Relief with representation of Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermesfrom the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Statue of Dionysusfrom the Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, the Statuette of Apollo and the Figurine of winged Nikefrom the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
The exhibition consists of 7 sections:
- Pan
- Aphrodite
- Apollo & Dionysus
- FrançoisVase, Kleitias and Ergotimos Krater
- Aristaeus
- Orpheus
- Nike
In each section, opposite to Cy Twombly’s works is displayed a selection of ancient Greek deities, “heroes” and personifications, creations of Archaic and Classical art that shaped and illustrated the characters and objects of Greek mythology, the source of Cy Twombly’s inspiration.
Cy Twombly‘s fascination with Greece is well known. Even though he first visited the country during the summer of 1960, Greek mythology takes an important place in his oeuvre already since the late 1950s. But it was only in the 1970s that he explored the Greek history and mythology in depth, culminating with his masterpiece, the cycle Fifty Days at Iliam (Philadelphia Museum of Art). He painted this work over the summers of 1977 and 1978 in his studio in Bassano in Teverina, north of Rome.
Twombly’s response to that decade’s disdain for painting was to transformit into writing, as in the famous large drawings Venus and Apollo, 1975 or the later, monumental Orpheus drawings, 1979. In his artworks -both in drawings and sculptures- he frequently alluded to the Olympian gods, from the major figures of Aphrodite, Apollo and Dionysus, to Nike, Pan, or Aristaeus.
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