Description:
cream colored square
Label Text:
Robert Ryman’s quiet and enigmatic prints and paintings make no reference to anything beyond their physical existence. His square, white, or neutral-colored images are the result of his constant experimentation with the properties of materials. Like his textural white paintings, which he has made since the 1950s, Ryman’s prints are explorations of the nuances of surface and composition. In A from the portfolio Four Aquatints and One Etching, a barely perceptible cream-colored square seems to float in the center of the thick sheet of paper. While this square appears uniform and flat at first, close looking reveals that the inked surface is speckled with tiny craters, exposing its irregularly soft texture. Curiously, Ryman signed the inked surface instead of the blank paper, perhaps in order to accentuate the square’s fluctuating edge or to call attention to the surface of the print. This sense of tangibility and the reality of the materials are of utmost importance to Ryman’s work: “I use real surface. I don’t use any illusion. It’s the real thing that you see … the real experience.”
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2011.68.1 |
