Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker and draughtsman who's work is seen as abstract expressionism. He is also seen as an action painter. He works on large scale pieces that include different medias such as written inscriptions, collage, painting and calligraphy, and often works on backgrounds of grey, tan and off white colours. The written elements of his work often quite poets such as Rilke, as well as referencing classical myths and allegories too.

"Cy Twombly's work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory. Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries.....His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures. Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself." - Katharina Schmidt