Untitled
Robert Ryman
ROBERT RYMAN, 1965. ENAMEL ON LINEN.
In 1960, Robert Ryman was working as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. His co-workers, working security and front desk respectively, were Dan Flavin, Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt. Ryman had moved to New York eight years earlier with the hopes of making it as a jazz musician, and took up the job at MOMA as a means for cash. Yet inspired by this environment, and the artistic contemporaries working alongside him, Ryman took up painting, though not in any traditional sense. Eschewing the vogue of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art, Ryman opted for austere, monkish works comprised mostly of thickly applied white paint. He stayed with these ideas for the better part of 6 decades. Ryman wanted to remove the distraction of colour, form and figure and create works that forced a focus on tactility and light. His works are incomplete until they exist in an environment, for the subtle changes of light and shadow complete the blank squares. The economy and simplicity are pleasing, but the works ultimate role is to ask a philosophical question; what is painting?