Robert Ryman at the Barbican: painting that asks for time
The Barbican Art Gallery in London is showing Robert Ryman: The Real Thing, devoted to the American artist Robert Ryman (1930-2019), until 28 February 2027. Bringing together works from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s, it pushes back against the shorthand of “white paintings”.
Born in Nashville, Ryman moved to New York in the early 1950s hoping to become a jazz saxophonist. He worked as a guard at MoMA, taught himself to paint, and gradually shifted the focus of painting toward what actually makes it work: pigment, surface, scale, light and space.
The show makes clear that the apparent restraint of his canvases is not a form of disappearance. In Ryman’s work, white brings out subtle differences in texture, edge, tension and the painting’s relationship to the wall, and the installation encourages direct looking rather than a fixed interpretation.
Among the key works is Untitled (Orange Painting) (1955 and 1959), which shows that colour was central to his early thinking, with a vivid orange and an acid-green underpainting. Surface Veil II (c. 1970), a rarely travelled large work, also reveals his craft in the way the stretcher, the canvas and the unpainted margin all become part of the image.
For painters and draughtspeople, the exhibition is a useful reminder that limited means can still produce a highly complex visual language. It also asks viewers to think of a painting as a physical object, one whose meaning changes with distance, light and the space around it.
Source : The Art Newspaper