Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

Edited with text by Matt Connors and Wells-Fray Smith. Foreword by Shanay Jhaveri. Introduction by Wells-Fray Smith. Texts by Darby English, Erica Cooke, Peter Osborne, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Adam Caruso, Matt Connors, Fergus Feehily, Roni Horn, Soweto Kinch, Adam Pendleton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Ryman, and Richard Tuttle.

A vital resource for understanding the depth and significance of Ryman’s practice, this volume reveals his steadfast belief that painting, when really seen, is for pleasure

American artist Robert Ryman believed that the poetry of painting was in feeling. For almost 60 years, he devoted himself to making paintings devoid of pictures of symbolic content, instead focusing his attention on materials and their effects. In works that range from intimate to monumental and flat to three-dimensional, Ryman explored the basic assumptions of painting—that it involves paint, on a surface, hung on a wall. His rigorous and playful body of work is marked equally by surprise and subtlety, sameness and difference, and by shifting uses of paint, gesture, support, size, line, fastenings to the wall and space. This new publication documents a range of Ryman’s paintings, showing the variety he produced as he experimented with painting’s expanse. Alongside new scholarship from influential writers, artists and musicians including Darby English, Roni Horn, Richard Tuttle, and Howardena Pindell, this book includes never-before-seen archival material and pays special attention to Ryman’s studio.

Designed by Studio Mathias Clottu, this book has been conceived as a material and tactile object in its own right. The bespoke white double jacket, with an under layer of card and top layer of folded glassine, subtly nods to Ryman’s own careful attention to materials.