Press room

Lead Supporter: Kenneth C. Griffin & Griffin Catalyst

In Autumn 2026, the Barbican will present a major new retrospective recognising the extraordinary career of American painter Robert Ryman (1930-2019). Robert Ryman: The Real Thing is the first exhibition in the UK to take an in-depth look at Ryman’s work in over 30 years and will be a key highlight of the Barbican’s Autumn 2026 season.

The Real Thing will feature over 60 works from Ryman’s prolific career from the mid-1950s up to the early 2010s. Arranged thematically, the exhibition will celebrate Ryman’s legacy as a painter who rejected the categories of representation and abstraction, choosing instead to ‘paint the paint’.

For nearly 60 years, Ryman dedicated himself to exploring – and questioning – what constitutes a painting: paint, on a surface, with a relationship to the wall and exhibited in space. He playfully and rigorously investigated materials and their effects, making subtle and surprising paintings that show and make visible materials as they are. Though Ryman primarily used white paint and a square format, this exhibition will reveal the remarkable variety Ryman produced as he worked across canvas, linen, fibreglass, steel, aluminium, Plexiglas, tracing paper, and coffee filter paper, using a range of paints including oil, acrylic, enamel, and epoxy.

Ryman’s interest in painting’s relationship to the wall and its presence as object in space is further seen in his choosing to make visible different hanging mechanisms ranging from custom-made fasteners, screws, and staples to masking tape in works that range from small and intimate to monumental in scale. For Ryman, every painting was a test to ‘see what would happen’ as he experimented with materials and the paintings’ interactions with each other and their surroundings.

The Real Thing takes as its starting point that an understanding of Ryman’s painting is unfixed, and is instead conditional on its unique setting. A self-described ‘realist’, Ryman believed that the poetry of painting was in feeling, and that painting was best understood through real, in-person experience rather than the intellect. The upstairs galleries will pay special attention to key aspects of Ryman’s work: his early training as a jazz saxophonist and his relationship to music; his studio process; his use of his signature and custom-made fixings as elements in a composition; and his relationship to drawing. Downstairs, a selection of paintings chosen from across Ryman’s career for their aesthetic relationships will present ‘the Ryman experience’, inviting visitors to play close attention to subtlety, nuance and visual complexity when viewing the works’ similarities and differences.

Featured works will include Untitled, 1958, an early painting inspired by Mark Rothko that Ryman made while working as a guard at The Museum of Modern Art, through to Untitled (Background Music), ca. 1962, Surface Veil II, ca. 1970, Pair Navigation, 1984 and 2002, and works from Series (White), made between 2003 to 2005. Special attention will be given to Ryman’s working in his studio through rare archival material and a display of several Surface Veil works, many of which were last seen together on Ryman’s studio wall in 1970. 

Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, says: "Since 2017, the Barbican has staged retrospectives of some of the most significant painters of the 20th and 21st century, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Krasner, Alice Neel and Noah Davis. Robert Ryman: The Real Thing carries forward this strand of our programme, while re-introducing Ryman to UK audiences following his last major show over 30 years ago.  Ryman was trained as a musician and often spoke about the experience of looking at paintings being similar to listening to music, knowing both could elicit delight. We anticipate his work will be appreciated and understood more profoundly within the context of our cross arts programme, and hope that our iconic brutalist architecture will provide the ideal setting in which to contemplate his alluring works, reaffirming that there are great pleasures to be had simply in spending time looking at a painting."

About Robert Ryman
Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 1948 and 1950, he studied at the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute, Cookeville, and the George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville. After two years in the Army Reserve Corps, Ryman moved to New York in 1952 to pursue a career as a professional jazz musician. The following year, he took a job as a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he would work for seven years. His time working at the museum in part inspired Ryman to devote his life toward painting.

Ryman had his first solo exhibition at Paul Bianchini Gallery, New York, in 1967, followed by several solo shows at influential galleries in Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, and Cologne (1968, 1969, 1971, 1972); Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf (1968, 1969, 1973); Fischbach Gallery, New York (1969, 1970, 1971); Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris (1969); Dwan Gallery, New York (1971); and Lisson Gallery, London (1972-73). He had a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 1977 and Tate 1993.

About seasonal programming at the Barbican 
As part of its Artistic Vision for 2025-2030, the Barbican has introduced a topline cross-disciplinary approach to its programming, breaking down barriers between artforms to explore the vital topics relating to our world, our society and ourselves. Working within a clear seasonal framework (spring, summer, autumn, winter), these programmes allow audiences to experience the critical ideas artists are grappling with from multiple vantage points in the way only a multi-arts cultural centre can truly do.