Nature or Nurture

Alessandro Twombly paints with his hands. Born in the Roman countryside, the son of Cy Twombly, is devoted to capturing the flora and fauna of his homeland in increasingly abstract and dynamic ways. For the artist, the natural world serves as a springboard for exploration of themes such as love and death. Twombly, known for his dynamic paintings and textured sculptures, once remarked that he “work[s] with nature like another artist might focus on the nude.” This April, in his first solo exhibition in New York in almost two decades, Twombly’s transcendent brushstrokes find a place at Amanita.

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The exhibition, titled “Etruscan Painting,” features a series of paintings all set against a bright teal backdrop. Unlike Twombly’s past works, where the ambiguous shapes are accompanied by even more ambiguous names (Some Sort of Divided Sun, 2020), the works in “Etruscan Painting” are more definitively titled (Gates of Rome, 2023) without forsaking any of the artist’s recurrent dynamism. The result is a tale of two distinct but parallel tales, where a pale pink lotus flower can come to symbolize a Tuscan rejuvenation (Birth of Florence, 2024) as well as a sacred aquatic perennial.

Twombly began his career as an artist after graduating from the London School of Economics and assumed a studio assistant position for Italian painter and sculptor Sandro Chia in New York. The artist had his first solo exhibition in 1986 at Rome’s Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, and made his American debut at Richard Milazzo’s Grand Salon. Since then, his works have gone on to be exhibited in various galleries and institutions across the world. The paintings of Twombly embody a fluidity that goes beyond conventional boundaries. Once viewers of his works grasp this amorphous essence, they are able to look beyond the limits of the canvas and perhaps find meaning within themselves.

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“Etruscan Painting” is on view until June 14, 2024 at Amanita Gallery at 313 Bowery, New York, NY 10003.