For decades, Maurizio Nannucci has preserved exhibition invitation cards. The collection comprises both invitations and announcements from artists whose approaches to art are close to his own. Yet many also come from wider circles of artist friends, colleagues, galleries, and museums, allowing a chronology of relationships and information exchanges to emerge. The selection in this volume makes visible how this kind of communication – often conceived by the artists themselves – superimposes the purely informative value of the printed matter with the freedom of artistic expression; evidence of a holistic practice where such cards can become artworks in their own right.

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was a private museum that opened in Kiyosato, Yamanashi Prefecture in 1990 and closed in 2014. This book, focusing exclusively on the museum’s “Ephemera” collection, is the first volume of a series of archival books on the museum’s collection.

This volume includes the works of Yutaka Matsuzawa, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Hanne Darboven, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, stanley brouwn, Tony Cragg, Wolfgang Laib, and many others.

Texts by Tina Barouti, Anne-Grit Becker, Natalie Dupêcher. Photographs by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

In the fall of 1952, Cy Twombly receives a traveling scholarship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York for his first trip to Europe and North Africa. He meets up with Robert Rauschenberg in Casablanca, and the two of them travel to Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains, and then to Tangier. They pay a visit to Paul Bowles in Tétouan and go on day trips with him to nearby villages and Roman ruins. Twombly conducts his first and last archaeological excavation there. Upon their return to Rome in February 1953, Twombly studies and sketches the ethnographic objects and tribal artifacts he sees on display in the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini. These sketches survive in the form of the North African Sketchbooks. Much of the surviving work from this trip consists of photographs taken with a Rolleiflex shared by the artists and sketches made by them, preserved in the archives of the Cy Twombly Foundation and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio; they provide a unique perspective on Twombly’s lesser-known affinity for Africa’s Mediterranean shores.

Exhibition pamphlet produced on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly Sculpture at Gagosian Gallery, London, 30 September – 21 December, 2019.