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