Robert Ryman

Robert Ryman (Nashville, 1930 - New York, 2019) was an American painter associated with monochrome painting, minimalism and conceptual art. He is best known for his white and off-white canvases, usually square or painted on metal, in which the brushwork retains traces of abstract expressionism.

He studied saxophone at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in Cookeville and at the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville. In 1953 he moved to New York City intending to become a jazz saxophonist. To make ends meet he took a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin and encountered the work of Rothko, de Kooning and Pollock. That closeness to postwar painting sparked his interest in the act of painting itself, and in 1953 he began experimenting in his apartment.

In 1955 he began what he regarded as his first professional work, Orange Painting (1955-59). His Classico series (1968-69) is among the most recognisable: sheets of paper taped to a wall, painted and then remounted, so that the paint edges and torn paper record the making. The Surface Veil works (1970), painted on fiberglass, share the same concern with surface and real light. From about 1975 until 2003 he often fixed his paintings to the wall with metal brackets designed for each piece.

Ryman also worked in printmaking, with etchings, aquatints, lithographs, silkscreens and relief prints, and used an unusually wide range of supports. He preferred the word "name" to "title", since his works were not meant to depict anything beyond their materials.

His first solo show was at the Paul Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1967. In 1972 the Guggenheim gave him his first museum solo show, and in 1993-94 a major travelling retrospective, curated by Robert Storr, toured the Tate, MoMA, the Reina Sofía, SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center. He received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2005. His legacy lies in pushing monochrome painting toward a sustained inquiry into support, light and process, an influence felt by later generations of painters.