NEW AT BASTIAN: JEFF KOONS & CY TWOMBLY PRESENT PRIMAL GESTURES
Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1971
BASTIAN recently announced Jeff Koons & Cy Twombly: Primal Gestures, which brings together a highly unusual pairing of two giants of post-war art. The exhibition will take place at the gallery on Davies Street from Tuesday 12th October - Saturday 4th December 2021, with private and press views. Highlighting two seemingly opposing practices, the exhibition exposes Twombly’s rich visual language of mark-making and gestural abstraction, pairing it with Koons’ machine-made fabrications.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by Koons’ monumental painting, Primal Swish (cover photo), executed between 2008-2011. The painting is an explosion of energetic swirls, with a three-dimensional rose. Lacking any emotive character and natural fluidity, these deceptive swirls and scripts have in fact been enlarged, edited and layered using Photoshop, before being fastidiously painted on canvas to achieve an exact replication.
Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Rubens Tiger Hunt), 2017
Exhibited alongside is Cy Twombly’s Untitled set of six lithographs executed in 1971. The series shows the artist’s desire to achieve a more expressive form of gesture. Working directly onto the litho stones, Twombly indulged in a more visceral process of mark-making, developing works that spoke directly to the relationship between crayon and stone, ink and paper. This is regarded as the pinnacle of Twombly’s achievements in printmaking - it encapsulates the artist’s fascination with raw, gestural mark-making.
Two further Koons works will be on show are from the Gazing Ball series in which the artist makes direct reference to canonical works art. In each image a mirrored, seemingly three-dimensional, hand-blown blue glass gazing ball reflects its surroundings. On closer inspection, the surface remains resolutely two-dimensional, drawing the viewer to dissect another cunning interplay between fact and fiction.
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BASTIAN, 8 Davies Street, London W1K 3DW
