Cy Twombly. Paradise presents an original perspective on the mysteries and revelations of Twombly’s art. His work revolves around the great universal themes of love, art, beauty, and death, and yet the singularity of his artistic vision, his unique perspective on the world, renders it original in the highest degree. Like his generational peers Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Twombly reacted against the dominant painterly tendency of Abstract Expressionism. But while Johns and Rauschenberg moved into Pop imagery and Dada procedures, Twombly cross-pollinated American gestural abstraction with the traditions of European painting. His innovative use of language and broad range of allusion and reference open his work up to history, literature, and philosophy, blurring the boundaries between painting, drawing, and writing while preserving a high degree of abstraction. A love of the vernacular is balanced against an extraordinary refinement and a profound cultural knowledge. Indeed, his work oscillates between binary opposites: reason and passion, figuration and abstraction, Apollonian and Dionysiac, sexuality and the intellect, antiquity and the present, imagination and observation, lucidity and frenzy.

Cy Twombly. Paradise is accompanied by a major publication in Spanish and English language versions. Edited by Sylvester and designed by Takaaki Matsumoto, this landmark book includes a full-colour plate section of the works in the exhibition, an essay “Psychedelic Antiquity” by Larratt-Smith, as well as a selected chronology and bibliography for the artist. The exhibition features loans of major works from the Cy Twombly Foundation, Colección Jumex, the Broad Art Foundation, The Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and distinguished private collections.