PORTLAND, OR.- Among the most important and influential artists of his generation, Cy Twombly has used mark-making and written language as the core of his artistic practice since the late 1950s. Twombly’s work has come to define an important branch of gestural abstraction that conflates painting and poetry, line and word.

The exhibition showcases three recent works—two virtuosic paintings and a bronze sculpture—that illuminate the artist’s continuing engagement with process and content, the immediacy of materials, and the continuum of history. Physical and emotional effects converge in the saturated color and vigorous surfaces of these recent paintings to suggest the transience of pleasure and life. The artist’s instinctive and intuitive brushstrokes coax poetry from the interaction of the pull of gravity and the liquidity of paint, dazzling the viewer’s senses.

Living and working in Gaeta, Italy and Lexington, Va., the 82-year-old Twombly continues to create challenging new bodies of work in painting and sculpture. His work has been the subject of two recent retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is in private collections and public institutions internationally.

The exhibition opens on February 6 and runs through May 16, 2010 at the Portland Art Museum.