Robert Ryman

From Artsy

An early pioneer of Minimalism—though he often rejected the label—Robert Ryman is famous for his abstract, all-white paintings. In typically square compositions, he found infinite variety, altering his materials, textures, brushes, glosses, and scales, as well as the layering, opacity, and specific shades of his white paints. Ryman also hung his paintings at different heights, framed them in myriad ways, and altered their distances from the wall. Ryman initially trained as a musician. He played with an Army Reserve Corps band before taking a job as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The experience exposed him to the work of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Abstract Expressionists including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who influenced his own practice. It also connected him with like-minded artists on the museum’s staff, including Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin. Ryman’s work has sold for eight figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Tate, among many other institutions.