Robert Ryman retrospective opens at the Barbican

The Barbican Art Gallery in London opened "Robert Ryman: The Real Thing" on October 8, 2026. It runs until February 28, 2027.

The retrospective brings together more than 60 works from the mid-1950s onward. For almost six decades Ryman, who lived from 1930 to 2019, worked mostly with white paint and the square format, testing how paint, surface and light behave. Instead of choosing between abstraction and representation, he set out to paint the paint itself.

Born in Nashville, Ryman moved to New York in the early 1950s to play jazz saxophone. A job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art put him in front of the Abstract Expressionists every day and led him to painting.

Among the loans are two "Spectrum" panels from 1984, lent by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Source: Barbican