Presenting a surface that is stunning in complexity and texture, Subject from 2002 is an ode to the virtuosity and theoretical genius of Robert Ryman. Epitomizing Ryman’s iconic style of work, which experiments with a limited palette of primarily white pigment on the neutral surface of a square canvas, Subject is a rumination on space, visibility, and environment. Subject is not only visually arresting, filled with infinite subtleties in texture and gesture, but is also a powerful embodiment of the career-long investigation of painting that has brought Ryman critical acclaim, widespread recognition, and an unshakable spot amongst the foremost contemporary painters of the Twentieth Century.

Ryman’s body of work has expanded the frontiers of art-making and indelibly changed the landscape of the art world as it exists today; indeed, his white canvases have become synonymous with the pioneering of revolutionary ideas around the fundamental question of how we see and how we relate to aesthetic objects. As exemplified by the textured and articulate surface of Subject, these minimalist canvasses may appear reduced and simple, but upon closer inspection, they reveal rich topographies that are filled with signification. While conceptually and visually cohered, each piece in Ryman’s oeuvre is greatly differentiated from one another. Experiments in reduction and spatial relation, Ryman’s paintings reduce the pictorial surface to the smallest number of visual components, heightening the viewing experience in relation to each element. In Subject, brush, canvas, and stroke become everything; by reducing his visual vocabulary to the skeletons of painterly language, Ryman cultivates a hyperawareness towards materiality, the intentionality behind artistic choices, and how varying minutiae can generate monumental differences in viewing experience. As the acclaimed critic and curator Robert Storr writes, “The idea that what an artist does is mark the world so that you can see it again (in addition to making a mark that is intrinsically interesting to look at) is, I think, the defining principle of Ryman’s work” (Robert Storr, “In the American Grain,” in “Robert Ryman” ed. Stephen Hoban & Courtney J. Martin, Dia Art Foundation, NY, 2017). A heavyweight figure in art history, Ryman is in part responsible for the recent critical, theoretical, and artistic turn towards an interest in the spatial relationships between art objects and the environment they inhabit.

Subject is a powerful testament to the potency of Ryman’s artistic project and the enduring genius of his oeuvre. Within the present work, an ocean of white comes to life through the artist’s vibrant gestural language, the creamy surface punctuated only by the slim ridges of paint that rise from the canvas like cresting waves. At every edge, stretches of untouched canvas border the white pigment like banks of sand. Within the composition, even the blank canvas becomes animated in relation to Ryman’s marks. His paint breathes life not only into the additive components of the surface, but into the blanks and space around them that so often are rendered invisible by our collective inurement to the beauty and fullness of all space. Many critics, such as Storr, have identified this particular quality as that which makes Ryman’s pieces so singularly brilliant:

Within Subject, the white pigment—a color often used to denote absence or subtraction—is reconfigured as an additive component and a powerful occupation of space. Possessing something of the unceasing dynamism and gestural complexity of Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the color reduction of Kazimir Malevich, and the same obsessive attention towards liminal spaces as Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman’s work pioneers a radical transition in art history—the restructuring of the optical experience of white. Surface epitomizes this project and is an indisputably lyrical iteration of the artist’s iconic white painting. This work stands out even amongst the artist’s remarkable body of work as one that is particularly dazzling in its textural complexity and elegance of execution. The unconcealed lyricism of the variegated surface of Subject begets an incommensurable kind of beauty; the deceptive simplicity of Ryman’s palette falls away to reveal an incandescent beauty and liquid grace.