Alessandro Twombly makes his Asia debut at M+M in Hong Kong
Alessandro Twombly makes his Asia debut at M+M in Hong Kong
Prestige HongKong
https://www.prestigeonline.com/hk/lifestyle/art-plus-design/alessandro-twombly-makes-his-asia-debut-at-mm-in-hong-kong/
By Stephen Short
Published:Nov 07, 2025 10:40 AM HKT
|7 MIN READ
How many famous artists’ sons or daughters have forged careers that surpassed those of their esteemed parents? Exactly. We can’t think of one. Such then, is – and has been – the challenge for a certain Mr Alessandro Twombly, the son of abstract iconoclast Cy Twombly, who spends his days outside Rome (he was born and mostly raised in Italy) on a small farm full of oak trees, cultivating olives and painting in a studio that was once his father’s. And no matter what – or how vigorously – he might paint, the shadow of his luminous forebear is ever-present. Later this month at M+M Gallery, bursting out of the blue like a dynamic flower on his eruptive canvases, Hong Kong audiences will get a rare opportunity to see the work of Alessandro Twombly in his exhibition Water Margin.
“We’re deeply looking forward to Alessandro Twombly’s exhibition, which has been nearly a year in preparation,” says Moe Zhao, one of the gallery’s partners. Earlier this summer, the gallery’s other partner, Mingyao Shih, travelled to Italy to visit Twombly, when plans were discussed and finalised for a new body of work, created specially in response to the ecological and environmental contexts of Asia, particularly Hong Kong.”
Twombly’s new series for Hong Kong’s Water Margin show presents an aesthetic that’s both austere (pared-down) and refined. Rather than simply depicting flowers, he uses the processes of growth and blossoming to echo the collective spirit and moral integrity embodied in the classic Chinese novel. In Twombly’s work, flowers are magnified beyond human scale, creating an immersive field of energy in which viewers are enveloped, experiencing the fusion of nature with a communal spirit.
Twombly’s version of nature is dynamic, constantly in motion, both creative and destructive. While artists are defined through, well, their art, he asks whether we reside in nature, or do we reflect nature, do we transcend nature or do we transcend ourselves through nature. It’s a big, cosmological question, which invites endless quantumplation about our role on the exquisite, iridescent marble of a planet on which we live.
Did he feel intimidated taking on the aesthetic of Chinese flora given the literati traditions of China – was there awe? “In matters of flowers, the top of the top is Vincent Van Gogh,” he says. “There’s no question about it. He’s somehow on an unreachable level, with these animated incredible colours with paint that can never be reproduced; that’s because he had this in his soul, more than in his head, his soul.”
He’s big on Claude Monet, too. “I particularly love the Nymph series. Those are paintings I’d like to live in.” And then – surprisingly and not – he references Francis Bacon. “I always loved Bacon, the work of the colours, the energy, the forms and shapes, and where to leave the blank space.”
It’s rare to equate Bacon with physical nature, but Twombly’s raw and unsettling imagery vibes with Bacon-esque brutality and bluster, and we see such in the show for Hong Kong. It’s a rage; be it rage against the dying of the light, or the rage of a planet with an ecosystem currently at war with itself. Nature as slaughterhouse, fighting a human-inflicted civil war upon itself. It’s both delicate and destructive dystopia.”
M+M gallery was set up earlier this year with a mission to introduce established Western artists to Asian collectors, while also presenting the postwar and contemporary art of Asia to audiences in the West, creating a curatorial platform for genuine cross-cultural and transhistorical exchange. Beyond the show in Hong Kong, the gallery will also show his work at the forthcoming ART021 Shanghai, where he’ll be presented alongside the significant post-war artist Li Fang (1933-2020). “We’re curious to see how audiences in Hong Kong and Shanghai will each respond to his work from their distinct cultural perspectives,” says Zhao.
When talking to Twombly there is, of course, the elephant in the room by way of his father’s shadow. The younger Twombly read modern history at the London School of Economics because he “wanted to find a different identity” but unable to forge a linear career path, he fell into art and is largely self-taught. Go back 40 years, and museums and collectors were scrambling to buy Cy Twombly’s works, and many of his canvases were selling for prices in excess of US$2 million. His work was distinguished by scratchings, splotches, charcoal-drawn letters, chalked signs, hastily scribbled colours and even graffiti that inspired countless exegeses – not to mention negative reviews from critics. To date, his most expensive work from 1968, Untitled (New York City), which is part of his Blackboard series, sold for US$70.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2015.
With the benefit of hindsight (Cy Twombly died in 2011) what does Twombly consider his father’s finest work? “I have one, which happens to be, I think, his largest canvas. I think it’s about 50 metres and maybe five metres tall. It took him about 10 years to complete and it’s called Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Ahern.
What especially resonates? “It’s an ambitious work, obviously, because of the scale. It has a compositional sequence which I really love. And I like how it starts from the left, with sort of squiggles and what I call spiders. And then that builds through half of the painting and then goes into this burst of colour and light. And everything is floating. And I really like it. I think it’s a masterpiece.”
And what did father think of his son’s artistic work – did he pass comment? “He never really told me anything about my painting,” says Twombly. But then, sometime around 2000 I started doing a series of works with a green background and I know he liked the colours, and I think he took some elements of that. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I had the feeling that he liked them – and with some of his later paintings, I saw a connection.”
And where does Twombly stand on the art world of today? “The attention to art back in the ’60s and ’70s is nothing like it is now; it was like 1 percent of what it is today, with fewer spectators and less interest. Now it’s become a kind of common ground, like going to the movies, or, like Hollywood, if you want to put it that way. It was a different world absolutely. A lot of the world was unexplored and there was a kind of beauty in freshness and freedom of that time. I don’t see that world anymore.”
He tried Instagram but stopped. The subtitle under Twombly’s Instagram handle reads “Alexander the Great”. “I was on Instagram several years ago but not now,” he says. “I think I got about as far as 2020. It’s informative and allows communication; I was enthusiastic for one or two years, it was a bit of an egotistical thing, but I overdid it and it started to burn me out. So I still think it’s interesting but after a while it sucks too much out of you.”
New York-based Richard Milazzo, writer, curator, lecturer and mentor to Twombly assesses his work for Hong Kong exhibition thus: “We must remember these floral forms belong to Nature, but they also belong to the artist as nature’s witness and medium, and as such they are subject to the transformation generated by his imagination. The paintings in their own modest and monumental ways picture these flora creatures raging against the dying of the light.” And an aesthetic and spiritual commingling of father and son.
Alessandro Twombly’s new solo exhibition Water Margin is now on view at M+M Gallery until 30 December 2025.