Robert Ryman, The Real Thing

Last Updated on October 8, 2026

American Artist Robert Ryman’s Work Featured in Major Barbican Exhibition

4.0 out of 5.0 stars

Robert Ryman, The Real Thing, the Barbican’s comprehensive retrospective of the American artist’s work, immediately faces the viewer with a conundrum. A former musician, Robert Ryman (1930-2019), believed that both music and painting were best understood through direct and immediate experience, rather than through intellectual analysis. Hence the title of this exhibition: experiencing Ryman’s work in person was, in his own words, “the real thing… the only way to do it.”

Yet, it’s also true that the more you know about his methods, his aims and his specific use of paints and a wide variety of materials – and be it through the catalogue, the free exhibition companion booklet or the audioguide, the Barbican provides extensive artistic and biographical information – the better prepared you are to face the sixty or so works assembled here and dive beyond their seemingly impassive mostly white surfaces.

Robert Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but moved to New York aged 22 and initially trained as a musician, intending to pursue a career as a jazz saxophonist. However, on a stint working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, he discovered visual art and the sheer pleasure that comes from looking at paintings. However, in deciding to dedicate his life to producing art, Ryman showed no interest in figurative paintings. Neither did he want his output to be described as “abstract”. Rather, Robert Ryman wanted to “paint the paint”, placing the focus on how a painting is made, and how it incorporates the wall on which it hangs, and the light and space around it. Ryman called it “realist”. Later in his development, the artist would incorporate the very means of attaching a work to a wall into the paintings themselves, the section entitled “Fixing and Fastening” showing works attached with masking tape, visible screws, bolts and custom-made fasteners.

At first, he used white paint: and it is a true joy to stand before a small white square, hung on a pristine white wall (the Barbican was meticulous in how it presented Robert Ryman’s work) and give yourself the time to discern the movement on the canvas, the suble, yet insistent brushstrokes running across left to right, their flow broken by the diagonal brushstrokes in the lower right-hand corner.

Not everything is uniformly white, though white does predominate. I particularly liked an early piece, Untitled, 1958, which shows the influence of Mark Rothko, whose work Robert Ryman had seen at MOMA and admired for what he called ‘its sureness”. This is a vertical rectangular painting in oil on stretched cotton canvas. Its division into two sections evokes Rothko: the lower section, bearing Ryman’s signature and date, is exposed tan cotton canvas; the upper section is painted with thin white impasto to achieve a flaked effect.

As you move along the first half of the exhibition upstairs, you come upon an unexpected riot of colour and movement. That’s the section called “Improvisation”, which shows, perhaps most clearly, the way in which music, particularly improv jazz, influenced the way in which Ryman painted.

The exhibition includes a section called “Archive”, showing a variety of materials, including pictures of Robert Ryman in his studios, first a small affair in the Bowery, which he shared with his first wife, the critic and curator Lucy Lippard, and later a much bigger place in the West Village, where he would work for the rest of his career. This section shows a picture of a wall in hia apartment covered in eight x ten inch black and white photographs of his work, which he collected and often rearranged.

Downstairs, in the wide open space of the Barbican Gallery, you get more of a view of his work as a whole; providing a wider Ryman experience. And the exhibition ends with “Paradox”, a 2027 documentary on Robert Ryman and his work, from the series Art in the Twenty-First Century.

Robert Ryman, The Real Thing is a highly informative account of the artist and his specific view of visual art, what it was for and how it should be seen. I have to say, though, interesting as I found it, I also feel the concentration required to discern the full import, particularly of the white canvases, made this a tiring experience. Maybe in our ultra-fast lives, we’re no longer have the mental stamina to just stop, stretch out the moment, and give art works the time they need to reveal themselves?

Robert Ryman, The Real Thing is at the Barbican Gallery until 28 February 2027
Opening hours: 10.00 – 18.00, Thur & Fri: 10.00 – 20.00. Closed Mondays. Tickets: £20.50 (concessions available)

To complement this landmark exhibition, the Barbican is hosting Ryman in Rhythm, a series of live jazz performances in the gallery inspired by Robert Ryman. 18 November – 26 February. Full details here

Barbican
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS

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