Exhibition Tour with Curatorial Assistant Amber Li

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.’