Robert Ryman was an American painter associated with Minimalism and Conceptual art. Early in his career he worked as a security guard at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he met coworkers and fellow artists Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt and was exposed to the works of Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still, among others. These encounters proved influential; Ryman experimented with paint in his apartment, exploring the effects of light, texture, brushstroke, and scale in his abstract compositions. He became known for his densely layered white paintings, with surfaces that revealed subtly muted tones of color. Describing his practice, Ryman once said, “I would begin by putting down a lot of color, and then it was always a matter of taking out, painting out the color; painting out the painting to where I ended up with very little color left.”

–Daniel Mauro, from the Glenstone Field Guide