Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations

Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations features approximately 25 small-scale works that are representative of his long and distinguished career from 1957 to the present. Ryman is best known for his square, white-on-white paintings in which he focuses on the fundamental, physical properties of paint. The paintings are drawn from private collections, some of which have rarely been shown in the U.S. It coincides with the artist’s 80th birthday.

Since 1950, Ryman has focused his attention on the material qualities of his paintings, turning the paint and the methods of application into the subject of his work. He has experimented with a variety of paints, ranging in viscosity and finish, as well as an assortment of supports, including canvas, wood, metal, paper, and plastic. Uninterested in painting a narrative or depicting recognizable reality, Ryman instead isolates the most basic components of painting—material, scale and support—investigating how each relates to the other. He once said, “Painting is a visual experience. I do something with paint, but I’m not painting a picture of anything. I’m not manipulating the paint into an illusion of something other than what the paint does. I make a painting.”

Ryman’s process does not favor one component over another but rather, he gives equal weight to his choice of paint, brushstroke, and method of attachment to the wall, which includes metal or plastic brackets, small screws, or masking tape. Despite the look of his paintings, Ryman does not consider himself to be an abstract painter. He has stated, “I don’t abstract from anything…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.”

Born in Nashville, Tenn. in 1930, Ryman moved to New York City in 1952 to play jazz and pursue a music career as a tenor saxophonist. To make ends meet, he worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art and eventually, by 1954, after looking at the work of Cézanne, de Kooning, Matisse, Picasso, and Pollock and sketching on stolen office supplies in the museum’s galleries, he put away his saxophone in favor of a paintbrush. Since his exhibition debut in 1967, he has gone on to be the subject of more than 100 solo exhibitions in 12 countries, at venues such as Dia Beacon, Beacon, N.Y. and Haus der Kunst, Germany. His work can be found in over 40 public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.; and Schaffhausen, Switzerland.