Cy Twombly, exhibition review: Teeming with energy

Like several of the other galleries that Larry Gagosian has opened worldwide, this latest addition to his empire opens with work by the late Cy Twombly. The third Gagosian in London, it is a beautiful space, designed by Caruso St John.

The works are from different periods. A series of large drawings relate to Twombly’s Bolsena paintings of 1969, made in an explosive period of creativity in a palazzo on Lake Bolsena, between Rome and Florence. Amid flurries of scratchy marks, sudden exhilarating bursts of colour and phallic forms, are scrawled calculations relating to the moon landings which happened days before Twombly made these works. They teem with energy and experiment.

It’s testament to Twombly’s longevity that the same, visceral verve is there in his Bacchus paintings made just before his death. They’re painted in red over ochre, the colour of blood over flesh and of the wine that stoked bacchanalian excesses in Roman myth, and they’re overwhelming, dizzying.

Two much cooler diptychs are nearby, featuring clusters of purple marks over white grounds. But beneath the surfaces are networks of red lines, like veins.

Twombly, this show powerfully reminds us, was a painter of pure, poetic passion.