This fall, Gagosian Gallery, one of the world's foremost modern and contemporary art institutions, adds one more selling outpost in Athens, Greece. The new gallery marks further expansion of Larry Gagosian’s empire, who began with his first space in New York in 1979. With the Athenian addition, there are now ten locations worldwide, which span New York, Beverly Hills, London, Rome, and Hong Kong, and make Gagosian one of the few that can lay claim to a truly global reach. The new Gagosian in Athens kicks off on September 25, with an exhibition of new paintings by Cy Twombly entitled Leaving Paphos Ringed With Waves, due to run through December 19, 2009.
“I am delighted to open a space in the historic city of Athens and we look forward to becoming part of the thriving contemporary art scene of this extraordinary city,” stated media-shy Larry Gagosian in the press release for the gallery’s virgin show. The new 90-square-meter gallery has been designed by Michelle Ballard. Located in Athens’ downtown Merlin Street, close to the central Syntagma Square and the Greek Parliament, the Greek branch of the hyper-competitive gallery makes Larry Gagosian feel cosy with top Greek collectors, like Dakis Joannou, Dimitris Daskalopoulos and Dinos Martinos, all of them listed on ARTnews 2009 list of top 200 collectors.
Gagosian’s Greek venture will be run by Marina Livanos, a shipping heiress whose father’s legendary sisters Athina and Eugenia were married, respectively, to Greek tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos (Athina to both). Marina Livanos, whose family collects art, is married to Andreas Martinos, nephew of Dinos Martinos, another of the country’s top collectors.
The Athenian inaugural exhibition is comprised by a group of four canvases, inspired by a quote from the 7th century B.C. choral lyric poet Alcman. Twombly used it previously in the ten-part Coronation of Sesostris (2000), which charts the energetic course and eventual demise of the Pharaonic warrior, Sesostris II. Twombly's abbreviation of the original line announces the departure from Paphos, the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite in Cyprus. The recurring boat ideograph in Twombly's work is a figure for passage and exile, voyaging and homecoming, death and imperial decline. In these paintings he imparts startling new vigour to the motif and its accompanying script in hot vermilions and rich yellows against expanses of vivid turquoise sea.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by British art historian Mary Jacobus and Demosthenes Davvetas, a poet and art critic.
Cy Twombly was born April 25, 1928, in Lexington, Virginia. He began his studies in 1947 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then in 1945/50 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. In 1950, he went to New York and continued his studies at the Art Students League. It was here that he got to know Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. One year later, he transferred to Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied with Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Together with Rauschenberg, he travelled through South America, North Africa, Spain and Italy in 1952.
Twombly taught at the Southern Seminary and Junior College in Buena Vista, Virginia in 1955/56, and then returned again to Rome in 1957. Two years later, he finally moved to Italy. In 1968, the Milwaukee Art Center presented his first retrospective in the United States, followed by large international exhibitions: The retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1987) travelled to Madrid, London and Paris. The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1994) continued on to Houston, Los Angeles and Berlin, followed by a large retrospective at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2006). In 1995, the Cy Twombly Gallery run by the Menil Family was opened in Houston.
Twombly has made many significant exhibitions with Gagosian Gallery and was the subject of an important European retrospective survey Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons initiated by Tate Modern, London in 2008, which travelled to the Guggenheim Bilbao and Museum of Modern Art Rome in 2009.
There are currently three major museum exhibitions on Cy Twombly running until October: Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007, which inaugurated the new wing of The Art Institute of Chicago, Cy Twombly: Sensations of the Moment at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (until October 11) and another one of eight new bronze sculptures at Gagosian Gallery New York (from September 15 to October 31).