Cy Twombly Post-It Notes

a tight photograph of two pale yellow post-it notes on the edge of a white painted bookshelf, with a somewhat unruly stack of papers, and a curled open book or magazine in two stacks. there is a third post-it note cropped out to the left, illegible. the rectangular post-ot reads the soul we once had, in sprawling, loose, and not especially straight writing with a black pen. the right post-it is square, with the word remanence written twice in all caps, once above a bisecting line, where it kind of gets cramped toward the end, and once below it. tacita dean photographed these post-it notes in the library slash bedroom of cy twombly in gaeta italy, in 2008. they were published in a cataloge in vienna in 2009 at mumok.
Tacita Dean, Gaeta, 2008, originally published in Cy Twombly: States of Mind, MUMOK 2009

Just thinking about Cy Twombly’s Post-it Notes this morning.

When Tacita Dean made her 2008 Gaeta photos from an exhibition catalogue essay into a gallery installation (2015), she printed this picture on one of the last giant sheets of Cibachrome paper. GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one, filled the south gallery of Dean’s Spring 2016 show at Marian Goodman Gallery.

a white gallery wall covered with a freely hung array of photographs by tacita dean, printed on various endangered photochemical papers, and mounted and framed in a variety of ways, all photos were taken in 2008 at cy twombly's house in gaeta, and picture closely observed details like books, post-it notes, the landscape of a tabletop, etc. as installed at marian goodman gallery in 2016.
Tacita Dean, GAETA 2015 — fifty photographs, plus one (detail), 2015, installation view from Marian Goodman Gallery, 2016

It’s also in the upper corner of the installation at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh, her show at the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio in Rome in 2021-22.

a curved temporary wall sits toward the back of a seemingly low ceilinged exhibition space, sandwiched between concrete slab floors and a concrete beamed ceiling. the wall is filled with tacita dean photos of cy twombly's house in gaeta, printed in various sizes and formats, large and small, black and white, and in color, on a variety of endagered chemical photo papers. from the fondazione nicola del roscio, in 2021
installation view of Gaeta (2015) at Tacita Dean. Sigh, Sigh, Sigh at Fond. Nicola Del Roscio in 2021-22