Curator's Notes

Curator's Notes

Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations offers a counterpoint to the prevailing view of Ryman as "a minimalist, reductionist, abstract," says Vesela Sretenovic, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Phillips. Instead, she explains, "there's an incredible versatility and richness" in Ryman's works, an endless exploration of the materials and methods of painting within the artist's chosen primarily white, square surfaces.

Bringing together about 25 works, this exhibition includes several rarely shown pieces on loan from private collections. While the works span more than 50 years of his career, the show is not meant as a retrospective, Sretenovic emphasizes. "It's not chronological, not hung that way," she says. Instead, she has grouped the works with an eye to visual conversation among them, much as the Phillips exhibits the works in its permanent collection.

Ryman originally came to painting from the world of jazz, without art training, Sretenovic points out, bringing with him a "fresh eye and mind, and no historical baggage." As the exhibition title implies, she also sees "a music and a rhythm" in his body of work.

Sretenovic also notes that Ryman's works are just themselves, without referencing  something else. Ryman has famously argued that this lack of an imposed story or a social agenda actually makes such so-called abstract paintings the most real. To experience his works, Sretenovic finds it is best "to give yourself time to look, look slowly and carefully, and let go searching for story or meaning. Rather, believe in your own intuitive feelings."

Robert Ryman, Untitled, 1957. © 2010 Robert Ryman.

©2012 The Phillips Collection.

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