Cy Twombly: A Survey of Photographs, 1954–2011 Poster

This poster reproduces Brushes, Lexington (2008/2009), a photograph by Cy Twombly made for his 2012 exhibition Cy Twombly: A Survey of Photographs, 1954–2011.

Gagosian staged the show at once in Beverly Hills, London, and New York. It was the first major survey of Twombly's photographs shown in either the United States or the United Kingdom, tracing nearly six decades of the practice from early black-and-white studies to the large color prints of his last years. Brushes, Lexington is a close, soft-focus view of paintbrushes standing in a jar in the artist's studio, the kind of blurred, intimate image he made repeatedly of his own working spaces.

Twombly (1928–2011) took up photography in the early 1950s. He kept at it throughout his career, a private practice alongside his painting and sculpture that he began enlarging on a color copier in the 1990s. The 2012 survey was the first exhibition to present that body of photographs on the same scale as his work in other mediums.