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Exhibitions

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Line and Space: Cy Twombly and East Asia

Dates : May 29 (Friday) – September 2 (Wednesday), 2015

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was one of the most widely admired artists of the 20th century. His honors and awards included Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale. The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, of which Hara Museum ARC is an annex, will be holding Twombly’s first solo exhibition in Japan Cy Twombly – Fifty Years of Works on Paper, a retrospective featuring works on paper (drawings, paintings, monotypes) spanning 50 years of Twombly’s remarkable career. Twombly’s art, which could be likened to painted poetry or a child’s graffiti, is characterized by improvisation and passion, its unique pictorial spaces filled with playfully floating lines, symbol-like markings, letters and even snippets of text.

This companion exhibition, Line and Space: Cy Twombly and East Asia, juxtaposes a number of Twombly’s artworks with selected works of traditional East Asian art from the Hara Rokuro Collection. The venue is the Kankai Pavilion, a gallery designed by Arata Isozaki in the style of shoin architecture, incorporating such traditional elements as tokonoma (alcove) and chigaidana (staggered shelves). The gallery is dedicated to the Hara Rokuro Collection. The comparison of Twombly’s art with the traditional idiom of East Asian painting is intended to throw light on his use of line, space and tone to create form. We invite you to explore the differences and similarities in a dialog that transcends time and culture.

Featured Works
Cy Twombly, Bolsena, 1969 / Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970 and others (Total: 6 works)
Landscape of Yodo River, Maruyama Okyo, Edo period / Dragon and tiger, Kano Tan’yu, Edo period and others