Artist Rita Ackermann checks into Cy Twombly’s retreat

In 1966, American painter Cy Twombly began a series of works which would set auction records for decades to come. His Blackboard paintings, created by scratching white crayon into wet grey oil paint, had a restrained palette but loose, gestural scrawls, appealing to both minimalist and abstract expressionist New York. 

Almost 50 years later, Hungarian-born Rita Ackermann crafted a response, creating a series of Chalkboard Paintings by partially washing away drawings to leave semi-abstract works. “I was around 22 when I made my first Cy-influenced works as a student,” says the artist, now 56. “Over the decades the affection looped back again and again.” 

On 10 June, Ackermann will open an exhibition of new works in Twombly’s former home in Bassano In Teverina, central Italy. Entitled Manna Rain, the show is inspired by one of Twombly’s largest works, Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) (1970). A 33ft-long canvas in the style of his Blackboard series, it is said to be a response to The Veil of Orpheus, a 1950s musique concrète (a composition that uses recorded sounds) which opens with the slow tearing of a piece of cloth. In Twombly’s studio, Ackermann has created a mural, Ubiquitous (Outside of Time and Space), with the exact dimensions of the original work. 

She focuses on rain, a nod to Twombly’s frenetic mark-making

Twombly, who was born in Virginia, left for Italy in 1957 and remained there for the majority of his life. He went first to Rome, before extracting himself to the woodlands of Bassano, where he bought a 17th-century palazzo in 1975. Its tuff stone walls protected the painter from the summer sun, and he filled its cool corridors with remnants of Roman and Etruscan statues until his death in 2011. Restored and reopened by Twombly’s family last year, the palazzo’s four storeys are now used for exhibitions by New York’s Amanita gallery. 

For her latest project, Ackermann has adopted Twombly’s toolkit of oil paints, crayons and pastels. She focuses on rain, a nod to Twombly’s frenetic mark-making, with references ranging from the biblical – the mysterious “manna”, which appeared like dew to feed the Israelites, is a recurring motif – to the cinematic. Mouchette in Hollywood recreates a scene of heavy rain at dusk from Robert Bresson’s 1967 black-and-white film Mouchette; Ackermann’s version is in pale oranges and pinks, slashed with grey. 

Twombly’s influence on Ackermann was not always obvious. Her early career was defined by figurative, almost cartoonish compositions of young women, reflecting ’80s street art more than ’50s modernism. Her bent for faces and figures remains. Some, like the bust in Bronze Tears, have a solidity which is unlike Twombly’s oeuvre; elsewhere, her lines are freer. The result, Ackermann says, is a body of work which captures Twombly’s “presence in the space while also continuing with my own trajectory in painting”. 

Manna Rain by Rita Ackermann is at Fondazione Iris, Bassano In Teverina, from 10 June to 30 July 2024. By appointment