Robert Ryman: The Real Thing is the American artist’s first major retrospective in the UK for over 30 years.

The show, at London’s Barbican Centre, brings 68 works together from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s. It is arranged thematically, without traditional wall text. There are no labels, even to identify the paintings. The exhibition follows Ryman’s thought that “you cannot understand a painting by explaining something. You can only understand painting by experience”.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Ryman initially aspired to be a musician. After two years playing the tenor saxophone in the US Army Reserve Corps, he moved to New York in 1952 to pursue a career as a jazz saxophonist. Claiming that he “never saw a painting until I came to New York”, he became intrigued after taking a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. He began making his own works in an attempt to understand, through experience, how paintings are made.

The Real Thing charts Ryman’s decades-long investigation, from the first “professional” painting he made in 1955, right up to the year he died in 2019. During this time he experimented with different materials, from linen canvas to aluminium, waxed paper, rolled steel and fibreglass.

Like all paintings, Ryman’s works are material objects. Many pieces are remade in each installation. Some works, like Versions VI (1991), have elements that are........

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