Installation view, Robert Ryman: Line, David Zwirner, London, 2023
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings by American artist Robert Ryman at the gallery’s London location. Organised in collaboration with the artist’s family, this exhibition will includes from the years 1961–2000, complementing the major presentation of Ryman's paintings from the early 1960s on view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, curated by Dieter Schwarz.
Featuring works made on a wide range of unorthodox supports, the exhibition underscores Ryman’s expansive approach to drawing. Much like his analytical yet intuitive exploration of the medium of painting, Ryman’s understanding of drawing reflects a singular investigation and deconstruction of the practice’s formal and material qualities. As Schwarz writes: “Drawings by Robert Ryman are not necessarily works on paper. They can also be executed on canvas, anodized aluminium, polyester cloth, Plexiglas, or Mylar, and for those in fact done on paper, that can include not just drawing paper—mostly tinted yellow or grey—but also coffee filter paper, manila paper, or glassine. For Ryman, ‘drawing’ is not about being confined to a single genre or fixated on a conventional picture support. In his practice, a drawing is an object insofar as it does not represent anything. Yet it is not an object in the sense of a fixed given: it is the outcome of a process during which he verifies the properties of the medium and the support of the drawing, connecting the two and creating a linear configuration that involves both components.”1
1 Dieter Schwarz, “Drawing the Drawing: Robert Ryman, Working the Line,” Robert Ryman: Drawings. Exh. cat. (New York: Pace, 2018), p. 7.
Image: Robert Ryman, Untitled Study, 1961. © 2023 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“Among the minute and exacting problems that Ryman sets for himself is the place of line in visual art and the difference between drawing and painting.”
—Vittorio Colaizzi, art historian, 2017
Ryman’s drawings are inextricably linked to line, which manifests as both a physical mark and a conceptual form that exists chiefly in relation to the other elements of a given composition—as a border zone between two painted passages, for example, or a partition for a matrix of gridded squares.
“It's a kind of basic theory of thinking about drawing that it has to do with line.… When I draw, I'm usually thinking about line, and what kind of line it can be.”
—Robert Ryman, 1992
Installation view, Robert Ryman: Line, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“He was enough at ease with his part in these works to use his signature as a compositional element. He wanted, first of all, to be there in the work, not to crystallize a perfect expression or a perfectly beautiful composition.”
—Carter Ratcliff, art critic and poet, 2009
“I felt that my signature could be a line.… So I could use that in various ways.”
—Robert Ryman, 2007
These works, like all of Ryman’s drawings, are marked by a profound intentionality; the artist carefully considers medium and support in relation to one another, striving for a holistic understanding of the drawn line in a multitude of forms.
Installation view, Robert Ryman: Line, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“The grid is always one of the most direct visual things, because you have the horizontal and the vertical … and they cross. And that's really very perfect.… Simple and right.”
—Robert Ryman, 1972
Ryman foregrounds the tensions that arise from places of delineation and intersection: at corners or edges, and between materials, surfaces, or textures. Working experimentally and iteratively, he subverts and expands the role of the line as one of the most foundational tenets of drawing.
“In works like Yellow Drawing #10 (1963) … there are infinite regresses of grids within grids that frame and reframe Ryman’s selective foci. Reminiscent of his repeated emphasis on certain shapes … these squares excerpted from their greater environs give form to outlined shape.”
—Suzanne P. Hudson, art historian, 2009
Installation view, Robert Ryman: Line, David Zwirner, London, 2023
“[The] ‘different feeling’ of a line is the feeling of its presence in the material.… Marks made by pencil, pen, intaglio, or some other graphic medium display less plasticity than paint and are more likely to be absorbed into the pictorial realm.… Ryman's generative problem in drawing is to find ways to make line acceptably real.”
—Vittorio Colaizzi, 2017
“The deciding factor, for Ryman, is the presence of line rather than the media employed or the support—paintings on paper are paintings not drawings. With the exception of dates and signatures, graphic line never appears in his painting.”
—Robert Storr, artist, critic, and curator, 1993
“The drawing that I did on the circle-paper … that worked very well, I mean visually, because you had the horizontal and vertical straight lines and they were broken by the circle space … which contrasted with that and contradicted it.”
—Robert Ryman, 1972
Installation view, Robert Ryman: Line, David Zwirner, London, 2023
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