Robert Ryman

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Robert Ryman (1930–2019) at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. Marking Ryman’s first solo presentation in Greater China, this exhibition will feature a range of works from the early 1960s through the 2000s, offering a concise survey of the materials, supports, painterly treatments, and ways of engaging with the wall that Ryman utilized over the course of his six-decade-long career.

Ryman is widely celebrated for his tactile works using white paint in all its many permutations, which he executed using a range of painterly mediums on various supports including paper, canvas, linen, aluminum, vinyl, and newsprint. Emerging in the 1960s, Ryman eschewed self-contained representational and abstract imagery, instead giving precedence to the physical gesture of applying paint to a support. Unlike many of the artists and movements with which he is often associated, such as abstract expressionism and minimalism (labels to which he never subscribed), Ryman neither reveled in the emotive qualities of gesturalism nor sought to eradicate the painterly mark; rather, his works are novel and sensitive explorations of the visual, material, and experiential qualities of his mediums that exist in a dialogue with their surroundings. His lifelong commitment to working in shades of white served as a means of enhancing the specific and the mutable in the experience of his art, calling further attention to the subtleties that distinguished one composition from another, and also drawing associations to conceptual art practices.