Robert Ryman: A New Way of Seeing symposium

This half-day symposium marks the major retrospective of American painter Robert Ryman’s work at the Barbican Art Gallery (Robert Ryman: The Real Thing, 8 October 2026 – 28 February 2027). For almost 60 years, Ryman devoted himself to making paintings without pictorial or symbolic content, instead focusing his attention on the physical properties of materials and their effects. In works that range from intimate to monumental, and flat to three-dimensional, Ryman explored the basic assumptions of painting – that it involves paint, on a surface, hung on a wall. His body of work is marked equally by surprise and subtlety, sameness and difference, and by shifting uses of paint, gesture, support, size, line, fastenings to the wall and space. This symposium revisits and rethinks Ryman’s work, connections and legacy from a range of perspectives.

Organised by Professor Jo Applin FBA, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Centre for the Art of the Americas

Speakers:

Indie A. Choudhury, Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art, Global Black Diasporas & Black Studies, The Courtauld Insitute of Art Briony Fer, Emeritus Professor in the History of Art, UCL Pia Gottschaller, Reader in Technical Art History, The Courtauld Institute of Art David Gray, Executive Director, The Greenwich Collection, New York