For over 50 years Cy Twombly has explored references from nature, literature, classical history and mythology through poetic, gestural painting and abstracted sculptures. His lyrical use of letters and words as formal elements in abstract compositions blurs the relationship between drawing and painting and emphasises the action of mark-making.

Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928 and between 1947 and 1952 he studied in Boston, Washington, New York and at the Black Mountain College, North Carolina. In the late 1950s he moved to Italy where he has continued to reside throughout his subsequent career.

ARTIST ROOMS contains one work by Twombly, an elegiac suite of watercolours entitled Souvenir de l’Ile des Saintes (Memory of the Island of Les Saintes) which was made at the end of 1979 and represents the artist’s first experiments with watercolour.

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