Memories, Mourning, and the Bright Light of Absence: Sally Mann at the Gagosian

Sally Mann’s “Remembered Light” is a reflection on intimacy, friendship, and loss captured in color and black-and-white photographs. While Mann became famous for her controversial images of her children naked and at play in their summer home in Virginia, this series of nearly fifty photographs at the Gagosian moves outside her family to focus on her friendship with the late Cy Twombly. Twombly, the painter famous for his large-scale fluidly gestural and scribbled abstract canvases, was a close mentor to Mann during their shared time in Lexington, Virginia up until his death in 2011. With “Remembered Light,” Mann takes the viewer into Twombly’s downtown Lexington studio to examine the quotidian and material details of his artistic life. Focusing on remnants and objects left behind, she mourns the loss of Twombly as both artist and friend by recording his absence in the spaces of his daily practice.

“Remembered Light” is a show of traces and fragments, a mixture of monochrome detail photographs offset by colorful images of drips and paint, that captures Twombly’s art-making in prints far smaller than any of his large painted works. Mann used a digital camera to look at the studio from a variety of angles, alternating zooming in on one wall or object and then out in another. This way, even though the series is contained to a limited environment, it continually reveals new facets of Twombly’s space.

Twombly himself never figures in these photos, but his presence is palpable in the evidence of his activity splattered onto the floor and painted across the walls. Looking at a 1999 photograph of paint-stained newspapers laid out beneath a canvas, an image from the start of this decade-spanning project, one envisions the artist at work there layering pigments and making marks on canvas, sometimes smearing the paint with his hands, perhaps just hours earlier.

Poignantly, it is at times difficult to tell the photographs created after Twombly’s death from those taken during his active art-making years. This disorientation is heightened by the lack of titles and dates on the gallery’s walls. That is, even in these later works, it often feels as if Twombly has left the scene only recently. In photographs from 2012 of painter’s tape and paint edges and images of empty outlets and loose cords, it is as if the canvases have just been removed and the appliances unplugged.

Nevertheless, that Twombly is gone is an integral part of the show’s atmosphere. His immediacy to these photographs renders his absence perpetually raw. With images of the jumbled and incongruous elements of Twombly’s studio—a frog seated on its haunches, cherub statuettes, a plastic flamingo—the viewer cannot help but try and fill in the gaps to envision a picture of Twombly’s personality from the objects he owned and worked alongside. Ultimately, however, the gaps win out and refocus one’s attention on the loss of Twombly.

Mann emphasizes this point by looking at the fleeting and transient in the studio, devoting many images in this show to the play of light on the walls and floor of the space. Light streams in strongly despite blinds closed over windows. Sometimes the light is so intense that it washes out the art supplies or objects it illuminates. Doing so, Mann captures and preserves the beauty of the impermanent.

Hung on the gallery’s wall is an excerpt from Mark Strand’s poem “The End,” which ruminates on the mystery of death. It reads, in part, “Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing/ When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.” Mann has done in “Remembered Light” what the living do in the face of the death of a loved one. She has created an intimate portrait of Cy Twombly without his physical likeness and an elegiac memorial without funerary flowers.

Gabriella is a senior at Fordham College Rose Hill.  She is double majoring in Art History and English, with a focus on Modernism.