Installation view, Robert Ryman: 1961-1964, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of early paintings by Robert Ryman (1930–2019) at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Curated by Dieter Schwarz and organized in collaboration with the artist’s family, the exhibition focuses on the years 1961–1964. Composed primarily of significant loans from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe, this is one of the most extensive looks at this formative moment in Ryman’s career. A complementary exhibition exploring Ryman’s drawings will be held concurrently at David Zwirner London.
Ryman gained initial recognition for the work he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, his paintings created prior to this period remain less well known to this day. Yet it was during the early 1960s that Ryman began to firmly establish the broad parameters of his radical and inventive practice. His paintings from these years reflect how, even at this early point, Ryman was already looking to interrogate and reinterpret the fundamental precepts of painting by experimenting with different supports and materials; deconstructing the relationship between frame and wall; and more broadly, investigating the visual, material, and experiential qualities that define the conditions in which a work of art is encountered. It was also at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale, a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.
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Image: Robert Ryman, Untitled, c. 1961. © 2023 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Private Collection.
“For Ryman, this was a period of questioning and innovation, and, at the same time, of wonderfully expressive and intense work. It is a period that establishes the basis for everything that’s to come for Ryman, as he confidently embarks on a truly unique and exceptional artistic path.”
—Dieter Schwarz, curator, 2023
“A former saxophonist who had moved from Nashville to New York to play jazz, and who taught himself to paint while working as a guard at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for much of the 1950s, Ryman spent his days consuming European exemplars—Matisse’s chief among them—and the Abstract Expressionism that had begun to populate the newly permanent collection. His first exhibited painting hung at the museum in 1958 in a staff exhibition.”
—Suzanne Hudson, art historian, 2019
Installation view, Robert Ryman: 1961-1964, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
This show includes representative works of all facets of Ryman’s painterly practice in the early 1960s, including his use of thick impasto brushstrokes on both stretched and unstretched canvas; heavily or sparsely worked paintings in both small and large formats; and a group of rarely seen works on raw linen, each featuring one or several seemingly complete, independent compositions. Dating from a critical moment in Ryman’s development, these works elucidate many of the fundamental ideas that he would continue to explore throughout his sixty-year career.
“I was just seeing how the paint worked, and how the brushes worked. I was just using the paint, putting it on a canvas board, putting it on thinly with turpentine, and thicker to see what that was like, and trying to make something happen without any specific idea what I was painting.”
—Robert Ryman, 1993
Robert Ryman, Untitled [Background Music], c. 1962 (detail)
“Ryman’s daily scrutiny of paintings by Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, Franz Kline, and others at his job as a guard at MoMA is one of two major formative experiences in the 1950s that remain visible in his work,” the art historian Vittorio Colaizzi writes. “The other is his study of the improvisatory art of jazz.… Playing with fat or lean, broad or narrow, red or green or black, Ryman began by reciting painting’s language, very much in the manner of a musician practicing scales.”
In Wedding Picture (1961), Ryman applied paint in many directions across much of the surface, yet the individual brushstrokes remain discernible and the support shows through in select areas, creating a sense of layering. This work also testifies to Ryman’s strong sense of color. The hues of blue with surprising incidents of green and yellow against the orangish-peach-colored board make this one of Ryman’s most visually impactful works from early in his career.
Robert Ryman, Wedding Picture, 1961 (detail)
“Wedding Picture was painted in Kennebec Point, Maine, on our honeymoon. Oil paint dried slowly next to the sea, and my grandmother saw the mostly white painting with a touch of green as a depiction of pine trees in a foggy landscape.”
—Lucy Lippard, curator and art historian, 2017
It was at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale—a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 with his wife at the time, Lucy Lippard, to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.
“[The square] seems to be the most perfect space. If you have an equal-sided space and you’re going to put paint on it and do something with it, then it seems like the most perfect space. I don’t have to get involved with spatial composition, as with rectangles and circles or whatever.”
—Robert Ryman, 1972
Installation view, Robert Ryman: 1961-1964, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
In One Down (1962), Ryman painted five distinct square compositions. For all of them, he put down a loose, brushy gesso ground, leaving two of the squares that way, while applying his distinctive thick, textured brushwork to the three others, which appear in a vertical stack in the center. The graphite outlines of other squares are also visible on the surface. The title of this work is a jazz reference to either the Barry Harris Trio’s recording of “One Down” from Preminado, or to Harold Land’s recording of “One Down” from The Fox.
“From 1962 to 1964,” Colaizzi explains, “Ryman … dispersed and scattered the strokes across large and small stretched canvases, on and off the stretcher. The white both overlaps and rubs shoulders with pieces of electric blue, rusty red, and other colors.… The final application of white is crucial, because the opaque substance’s ridges and shadows suppress the colors’ flickering opticality. And at the same time it does no such thing.… Traces of viscous paint draw attention back to a second simultaneous order of perception that privileges material over color relationships.”
Learn more about Untitled, c. 1963
“At the beginning when I first began the—well, the white paintings if you want to call them—I would begin by putting down a lot of color and then it was always a matter of taking out, painting out the color; painting out the painting to where I ended up with very little color left. And it was painted over, but maybe a little red here or a blue shape slightly on the edge. The edges were very important. But it was always subtracting, you know, putting a lot of color and then subtracting with the white.”
—Robert Ryman, 1972
Installation view, Robert Ryman: 1961-1964, David Zwirner, New York, 2023
Untitled Study (1963–1964) is a rare early painting done on a blue ground. While he is best known for his lifelong exploration of the subtle visual and experiential qualities of white paint, Ryman did explore colored grounds like this early in his career (as well as in his very last series of paintings). Here, the blue foregrounds the tangle of white impasto brushstrokes and establishes a sense of surface and depth—like foam floating on top of water—without any recourse to pictorial illusionism. Darker blue brushstrokes underlie the white, appearing almost like shadows and reinforcing the sense of layering in the work.
“Each of Mr. Ryman’s paintings is a riddle of physical facts, choices and details as well as optical experiences. The more you look, the more you see, and learn about the way an artist’s mind works … touching and considering every point no matter how small.”
—Roberta Smith, art critic, 2015
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