Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, though following a trip to Rome with Robert Rauschenberg in the 1950s, permanently relocated to Italy, living between Rome and the Southern Italian sea-side town of Gaeta. He worked in the mediums of drawing, collage, painting, printmaking, and sculpture, but he is most recognisable for his works on canvas and paper, articulated with gestural brushwork that both suggest figuration and word without being either.

His two-dimensional backgrounds are textural, variations of white, cool grey, and cream with details in pencil, chalk, and vidid paint. Though he often employed automatism in his process, his works sometimes contain references to specific locations. He found inspiration in mythology and antiquity, and art communicates a tension between memory and oblivion. He is associated with the artist Franz Kline and the Abstract Expressionist Movement. His career gained international visibility after his 1994 show at MoMA in New York. In 2001, he received the “Golden Lion”at the Venice Biennale, and in 2008, the Tate Modern held a major retrospective of his work. Twombly passed away in the summer of 2011 at the age of 83.