Cy Twombly, Ferragosto V, 1961. Oil paint, wax crayon, lead pencil on canvas. 164.5 x 200 cm

This will be the first major exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly for fifteen years. It will present a unique opportunity to examine his paintings, drawings and sculpture across his long and influential career. The exhibition coincides with his 80th birthday.

The exhibition will be structured around a number of significant moments in Twombly’s oeuvre and will provide a carefully selected overview of Twombly’s work from the 1950s to the present day. Arranged broadly chronologically, it will feature concentrated groups of related paintings from key periods and some of Twombly’s monumental series of paintings, interspersed with more intimate rooms devoted to drawings or sculpture.

The exhibition will reunite, for the first time, several key series including the Ferragosto paintings from 1961, the enormous Veil works from the late 1960s and the Nini’s paintings from 1971. The exhibition will also include examples of Twombly’s most recent work such as the Bacchus paintings from 2005.

Cy Twombly was born in Lexington Virginia in 1928 and studied in Boston, and New York. He met Robert Rauschenberg at the Art Students League in New York in 1950 and later attended the influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied under Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Motherwell inspired Twombly’s interest in calligraphy and the automatic drawing technique of the Surrealists. Twombly combined this with the expressive gestures of Jackson Pollock to create his highly recognisable graphic style.

During the mid 1950s, Twombly shared a studio and worked closely alongside Rauschenberg in Manhattan. Works from this time reveal dispersed patches and stretches of pencil and crayon across acrylic or oil on canvas fields. Twombly’s move to Italy in 1957 coincided with a shift away from Abstract Expressionism to a mature style inspired by poetry, mythology, the classics and European history and literature. He introduced rich colour and words which allude to classical themes into his works. By 1959 numbers had followed words into such images as the Poems to the Sea series of drawings. Signatures were joined, at the start of the sixties, by pencilled titles and notations of the places and dates of the works’ completion.

In 1976 he resumed making sculpture after a pause of seventeen years and this exhibition will include rooms devoted to his sculptures from that decade and the early 1980s. In the eighties, his focus on water emerged as is illustrated in the Green paintings from 1988 and the Hero and Leandro works from 1984. During the nineties Twombly remained devoted to themes from nature, in particular the four seasons and flowers.

A fully-illustrated colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition and will present contributions by established scholars of Twombly’s work alongside fresh research from younger writers. The exhibition will be curated by Tate Director, Nicholas Serota in close discussion with the artist. He will be assisted by Assistant Curator, Nicholas Cullinan.

The exhibition will travel to The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, 28 October 2008 – 1 February 2009 and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 25 February – 17 May 2009.