Robert Ryman: The Real Thing” at the Barbican

More than 30 years after the last British exhibition dedicated to him, Robert Ryman (1930-2019) receives a major retrospective at the Barbican, bringing together over 60 works produced between the mid-1950s and the early 2010s. Organized thematically, “The Real Thing” celebrates the legacy of a painter who rejected the categories of representation and abstraction to, in his own words, “paint paint”: over nearly six decades, Ryman investigated what constitutes a painting — paint, surface, relationship with the wall, presence in space — using predominantly white and square formats, but with a remarkable variety of supports, from cotton to steel, including fiberglass, Plexiglas, and coffee filter paper. His interest in the relationship between painting and wall is also evident in how he made the very fixing mechanisms visible — screws, staples, adhesive tape — as elements of the composition. The upper floors of the museum pay special attention to Ryman's early training as a jazz saxophonist and his relationship with music, his studio process, and the use of his own signature as a visual element, while the ground floor brings together paintings from different periods of the artist's career to invite the public to perceive their subtleties and nuances.