Why Cy

In February 2024, Tacita Dean undertook a residency in the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston. Designed by architect Renzo Piano in collaboration with Twombly, the Gallery houses a display of Twombly’s work organised by the artist to augment the building’s mood of disorientation and temporal suspension. For Dean, it is a site of pilgrimage and ‘a place to go out of your head’. Dean has loved the work of the American painter and sculptor since writing her art school thesis on him in the late 1980s. She photographed his studio home in Gaeta, Italy, in 2009, made a film with him in 2011 called Edwin Parker, and has written about his work on numerous occasions. During her time at the Menil, she asked permission to spend a night in the Gallery. Why Cy is a book of exuberant adoration, full of colour and black-and-white photographs that pay homage to this singular artist. It reflects Dean’s longstanding admiration for Twombly’s work and her close affinity with it, while at the same time taking a new, surprising, and unintended path. The book includes a booklet of notes by Dean developed out of her night with Cy, and coincides with the exhibition ‘Tacita Dean: Blind Folly’ at the Menil Collection (11 October 2024–19 April 2025), which includes a room dedicated to celebrating the connection between Dean and Twombly.