ART CITIES: N. York-Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman is known for his tactile monochromatic works, which he executed using a range of painterly media on various supports, including paper, canvas, linen, aluminum, vinyl, and newsprint. Emerging in the 1960s, Ryman eschewed self-contained representational and abstract imagery, instead giving precedence to the physical gesture of applying paint to a support. Unlike many of the artists and movements with which he is often associated, such as abstract expressionism and minimalism (labels to which he never subscribed), Ryman neither reveled in the emotive qualities of gesturalism nor sought to eradicate the painterly mark; rather, his works are novel and sensitive explorations of the visual, material, and experiential qualities of his media that exist in a dialogue with their surroundings.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

The exhibition “The Last Paintings” features Robert Ryman’s eight intimately scaled square works created in 2010 to 2011, the last paintings that he would produce before his death in 2019, these paintings  as the culmination of many of the artistic interests and impulses that guided Ryman throughout his career. In these paintings, expanses of densely worked white, cream, and subtly muted tones of pale green and taupe widen and narrow at the edges of the support to reveal canvases primed in bold matte veils of vivid color. While Ryman often exposed the untreated canvas or ground in many of his works, the colors revealed beneath the loose squares and rhombus-like shapes of variegated whites in these compositions are the most pronounced to ever appear in his practice, harkening back to color elements in some of his earliest, most significant paintings from the 1950s and early 1960s. The burnt orange ground in several of these canvases directly recalls the color of Untitled (Orange Painting) (1955 and 1959; promised gift to The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Ryman’s first mature painting. Reminiscent of Ryman’s brushwork in his early compositions, each heavily worked surface appears like a textured network of short, gestural daubs and strokes of paint that amass into a vibrant whole. Rather than undermine the visual qualities of the fields of white paint, the rich colors of the grounds draw out these textural and tonal nuances. Though similar in format and execution, these final canvases continue to demonstrate the inexhaustible and probing nature of Ryman’s singular approach to painting.

Robert Ryman, (30/51930-8/2/2019) in 1948 attended Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and George Peabody College for Teachers in his native Tennessee and then served in the military for two years. In 1952 he moved to New York. Initially he had expected to become a professional jazz saxophonist, but while working as a guard in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a job he held for seven years and became friends with Dan Flavin and Michael Venezia, both of whom were also working at Museum. In 1961 he also began to paint on a full-time basis. During the early 1960s, Ryman spent a great deal of time with other artists whose studios were on the Bowery, including Tom Doyle, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Sylvia & Robert Mangold. At this time, Ryman began executing his first paintings on metal (vinyl polymer on aluminum), a support he would use many times again. In 1966 Ryman’s work was included in “Systemic Painting” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, along with twenty-eight other artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella. The artist’s first solo exhibition took place at the Paul Bianchini Gallery, New York, in 1967. Two years later, Ryman was included in “When Attitudes Become Form”, a seminal exhibition of works by Minimalist and Conceptual artists organized by the Kunsthalle Bern. Ryman concentrated on monochromatic canvases, and, setting himself apart from the Abstract Expressionist painters, he quickly determined that the absence of color would be his central pictorial element. By restricting his palette to white, Ryman discouraged any referential color or hint of subject matter. Yet he claimed that white had no special significance, that it was “just a means of exposing other elements of the painting”. Within his self-imposed boundaries, Ryman attempted to investigate the core issues of painting—how paintings are made, how they are placed on the wall, the relationship of paint to surface, and so on. Sometimes his brushstrokes were highly visible, though often his surfaces seemed imperturbable and spare. He experimented with many supports, including canvas, aluminum, steel, paper, fibreglass, copper, and Plexiglas, and often employed a wide range of fasteners—which he considered fully a part of his works—to attach his artwork to the wall. Using this approach, he examined the interstices between art as object and art as surface.

Photo: Robert Ryman, Untitled, 2010, Oil on stretched cotton canvas, 18 x 18 inches (45.7 x 45.7 cm), Signed and dated verso, Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, © Estate of Robert Ryman, Courtesy Estate of Robert Ryman and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/2-26/3/2022, Days & Hour: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com