Robert Ryman

A major new retrospective of works by Robert Ryman, the extraordinary American artist whose paintings invite us to take a closer look.

The Real Thing is the first major UK exhibition of Robert Ryman's paintings in over 30 years. Emerging as an artist in New York in the mid-1950s, Ryman approached every painting as a test to ‘see what would happen’, discovering that ‘there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint.’ For almost six decades, Ryman mainly used white paint and a square format to test materials and their effects, producing a remarkable variety of paintings that affirm materials as they are and ask us to pay attention to subtlety and nuance. Presenting over 60 works from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s, this exhibition celebrates an artist who believed the poetry of painting was in feeling, and that painting was best understood though real, in-person experience: ‘the real thing…was the only way to do it.’