Cy Twombly & Barry X Ball

“My goal from the beginning of this project has been to utilize this objective, scientific scan data trove as a starting point to create poetic new sculptures - sculptures that will retain all the power and mystery of Medardo Rosso’s while introducing a panoply of subtle alterations that will profoundly transform them and make them decidedly my works - Barry X Ball originals.”

Mignoni is pleased to present Cy Twombly & Barry X Ball: A History of Painting and Sculpture. In collaboration with Mccabe Fine Art, this exhibition explores how both American artists' works were heavily influenced by their lifelong inspiration with the rich cultural heritage and history of Italy. The exhibition includes paintings and works on paper by Cy Twombly alongside sculptures executed in different exotic translucent stones by Barry X Ball.

The exhibition brings together these two American Artists, who have differentiating approaches to their work, yet share an overlapping and shared influence from Italian masterpieces. Much of the inspiration pulled from their work can be pinpointed to Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque periods but also influences from artworks in the early Twentieth Century.

The work on view presents key examples of these artists' unique approaches to painting and sculpture with the shared goal of reimagining the work of masters into new poetic artworks. Twombly’s approach is to use painterly and poetic gestural movements to represent historic moments. While Barry X Ball utilizes state-of-the-art technology to refine and “perfect” sculptures into his version based on masterworks; most notably in his Medardo Rosso Project, which showcased the dialogue between two artists from different cultures, time periods and traditions.

American painter, sculptor, and photographer, Edwin Parker ‘Cy’ Twombly Jr. is known for his large-scale, gestural, and abstract works. Often hailed as one of the most important artists of the post-war era, Twombly forged a distinct artistic idiom, infusing his painterly language with sources from antiquity, art history, classicism, and literature.

Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, Twombly – nicknamed Cy after the great baseball player Cy Young – began practicing art at a young age, taking private lessons from the age of 12. Studying in a range of schools, including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Washington and Lee University, Twombly attended The Art Students League in New York from 1950 to 1951. It was here that he met fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg, who suggested that Twombly attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Here his peers included Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and John Cage. After his first exhibition at Samuel M. Kootz in 1951, which showed gestural, linear works inspired by Kline, Twombly received a grant which allowed him to travel to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France. On his return to the United States in 1954, he served in the army as a cryptographer, before teaching in Virginia, and painting in his spare time. Three years later, he returned to Italy, settling in Rome where he would remain for the rest of his life. The Mediterranean landscape, history, and culture would remain central to Twombly’s painting throughout his career.

Barry X Ball born in 1955, Pasadena, CA is a contemporary sculptor based in New York. His work has been widely shown internationally over the last 35 years and is represented in many public and private collections. A major survey exhibition of Ball’s figurative stone sculptures was staged at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2020. The artist’s Medardo Rosso Project debuted at Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art (Venice) during the 2019 Venice Biennale. A retrospective exhibition of Ball’s work was presented at the Villa Panza in Varese, Italy in 2018. Ball’s monumental Pietà and Pseudogroup of Giuseppe Panza were shown concurrently at the Castello Sforzesco Museum of Ancient Art in Milano.

Ball’s sculptures, although paying reverent homage to their historical antecedents, are completely new. Through the use of unconventional materials and innovative methods, the artist has reinvigorated the age-old tradition of figurative sculpture. Ball employs an elaborate array of equipment and procedures to realize his works, ranging from the cutting edge to the traditional, from 3D digital scanning, virtual modeling, rapid prototyping, and computer-controlled milling to exquisitely-detailed hand carving and polishing. With their simultaneous fever-pitch intensity and surreal stillness, Barry X Ball’s bravura works make an expansive case for the reconsideration of contemporary sculptural practice.