Robert Ryman (1930–2019) once said that his goal was ‘to paint the paint’, and he told another interviewer: ‘There was never a question of what to paint, but how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image.’ The artist’s ‘how’ is a pleasure to behold: working on canvas, steel, copper, fibreglass and Plexiglas, he also considered the fixings that fastened his paintings to the wall part of each piece. For much of his career he used only white paint, to eliminate distractions and to throw his technique into sharper relief, yet he approached each painting in a spirit of improvisation. The Barbican’s six-decade survey includes rare pieces such as Standard (1967), a 12-panel work in which Ryman applied paint horizontally across rolled steel, which gets its own room here (8 October–28 February 2027).
Find out more from the Barbican’s website.
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