Nini’s Painting
- Year1971
- MaterialEmulsion paint, crayon, colored pencil and pencil on canvas
- Dimensions250.3 x 300.4 cm
- Year of acquisition1995
- Inventory numberUAB 451
- On viewCurrently not exhibited
- Copyright© Cy Twombly Foundation
- Audioguide
More about the artwork
In “Nini’s Painting” from 1971, Twombly’s gesture increasingly begins to approach the condition of writing. At times one can almost discern individual letters and words among the lines, such as the names Cy and Nini, but there is no clear linguistic connection. The painting is an homage to Nini Pirandello, the wife of Twombly’s gallerist Plinio De Martiis, who took her own life in 1971. Grief is only too often a tortuous condition in which one wishes to speak without being able to. And thus Twombly’s act of painting was a constant overwriting, an attempt to express himself, knowing that he would fail. Twombly’s marks seemingly withdraw into this state of limbo. They leave behind a palimpsest of remembering and forgetting, of profusion and depletion.
