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ROBERT RYMAN (b. 1930) UNTITLED signed and dated "Ryman 69" along the lower edge acrylic polymer ...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:50,000.00 - 70,000.00 USD
ROBERT RYMAN (b. 1930) UNTITLED signed and dated  Ryman 69  along the lower edge acrylic polymer ...
ROBERT RYMAN
(b. 1930)
UNTITLED
signed and dated "Ryman 69" along the lower edge
acrylic polymer on fiberglass panel
181/2 x 181/2 in. (47 x 47 cm)
executed in 1969
ESTIMATE: $50,000-70,000
PROVENANCE
Galerie Konrad Fischer, DüSSELDORF
Private collection
Galerie Pierre Hubert, GENEVA
When we look at paintings, we are generally looking for something in painting, something that paint describes, or suggests, or evokes. It may be an image, a symbol, or an idea. Frequently it involves a synthesis of all three. Even in its most abstract form, therefore, painting has usually been about something outside or beyond itself. Consequently, it has commonly been regarded as a means to an end, the way in which the artist envisions reality or depicts things that may exist only in the imagination. For the past thirty years, Robert Ryman has approached painting from the opposite direction. "There is never a questions what to paint," he once said, "but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image."
The radicality of Ryman's work results from the deliberate, even literal manner in which he has elaborated in the studio upon this simple proposition. This work's quiet poetry derives from the dazzling variety of form and feeling he has discovered by adhering his faith in paintings inherently inexhaustible visual and emotional richness. Rather than ask what paint can respect, he asks only that one pay close attention to what paint does, and to the space it occupies. "To paint the paint," as he further defined his ambition, means giving absolute primacy to subtle specifies of a given application of pigment to a given surface. And, as he has shown in example after example, what seems obvious to the mind when explained in so many words may suddenly appear to marvel to the eye when closely examined in its material.
R. Storr, ROBERT RYMAN PAINTINGS 1955-1993, exhibition flyer, p. 1