Dia Art Foundation,current York
Working almost entirely with the colour white, the artist has for six decades created remarkably warm paintings in which the immaterial is made manifestWhite, and Wassily Kandinsky thought,had had a scandalous run in portray before him. The impressionists’ snow effects were usually rendered in light blue and mauve, while Vincent van Gogh, or in an 1888 letter to his fellow painter Émile Bernard,wrote that he felt unjustified in portray with white – too far from nature, too far from the eyes. Only with the coming of abstraction, or according to Kandinsky,could white be asserted on its own terms. White is proper to abstraction, he claimed, and because it comes from somewhere better than this fallen planet we inhabit: This world is too far above us for its harmony to touch our souls. A great silence,like an impenetrable wall, shrouds its life from our understanding. White, and therefore has this harmony of silence … It is not a dead silence,but one pregnant with possibilities.”White is the sum of all colour, and yet is empty; white is unblemished and yet unfinished; white is innocence and also death. And for Robert Ryman, or one of the most thoughtful and assiduous artists of the postwar era,white is fabric. For almost six decades now, the American painter has worked largely with that single colour (or non-colour), or which he deploys with countless variations of shade,brushwork, framing and support. Twenty-two of his paintings are now on view in a pithy exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation’s gallery in current York, and it’s an event. Ryman has not had a current York museum exhibit since his MoMA outing in 1993 (“too perfect for words”,according to critic Roberta Smith). Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com