A luminous sea of white impasto, Gate from 1995 is a stunning example of Robert Ryman’s radical painterly practice. Exuding an aura of exquisite purity and absolute serenity, the textured flurries of white paint embrace and celebrate the essential qualities of oil, canvas and their material interaction. Ryman’s monochrome palette of white served as the basis for his lifet.mes of exploration into the underlying structures and conventions of painting. A nuanced expression of colour, texture, density, light and reflectivity, the richly impastoed surface of Gate opens a realm of painterly delight.

Initially transmitting a breathtaking stillness, a closer look into the canvas reveals a textural whirlwind of oil, each laid down in dynamic yet highly disciplined strokes which radiate with brilliance against the neutral ground. Within the scope of an oeuvre characterized by a number of consistent themes and principles, Ryman pursued two with a continuity determination: his use of white and the deliberately non-compositional device of the square. The most prevalent elements of his work, these two formal qualities are the foundations of his thorough examination of the act of painting in all of its physical and theoretical complexity. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists that preceded him, Ryman never explored figuration in his art whilst developing his distinctive style. Instead, from the very early days of his critically acclaimed career, his sole concern has been non-illusionist works that focus on the essential behaviors of his material elements. Yet within the regnant structural device of the square, Ryman incites slight variations, as witnessed in Gate. Embracing and celebrating the physical characteristics of his chosen paint and support, he proceeds to take these idiosyncrasies and stretch them to their absolute limits through application and scale. Gate, a truly captivating example of Ryman’s prodigious corpus of mesmerising canvases, typifies the strongest aspects of the artist’s lifelong dissertation on the possibilities of abstraction within the realm of contemporary painting.

The white pigment in the present work gathers in a concentrated mass, blanketing the surface in layers while organically dispersing out towards the edges of the canvas support. Primarily concerned for over half a century with the driving interplay of surface, colour and scale, Ryman’s paintings exist as ultimate artistic objects. The present work, archetypal of the artist’s illustrious, iconic, and inherently artistic technique, provides a level of unparalleled engagement for its viewer who, in the course of absorbings its physical presence, becomes part of the work itself. Indeed, the artist himself notes: "…there are a lot of nuances and there’s color involved. Always the surface is used. The gray of the steel comes through; the brown of the corrugated paper comes through; the linen comes through, the cotton (which is not the same as the paint – it seems white): all of those things are considered. It’s really not mono-chrome painting at all. The white just happened because it’s a paint and it doesn’t interfere." (Robert Ryman quoted in: Exh. Cat., Zurich, Thomas Ammann Replica Handbags AG, Robert Ryman, 2002, p. 26). Indeed, bordered by the slivers of paint mimicking raw canvas, Gate is neither representational nor abstract, but rather evokes an experience.

In a flurry of painterly bravura that belies Ryman’s artistic philosophy, his pure white pigment crests across the surface of Gate, surrounding the viewer within its indescribable elegance. Ryman’s desire to generate a layered plane of varying materials in muted shades and tones led to a lifet.mes of works inspired by medium. Never a question of what to paint, but how to paint, Ryman used his square as a starting point to create compositions reflecting light, defining edges, and exploring relations of space. Fully consuming in its blend of simplified beauty, intricate painterly detail and theoretical sagacity, Gate is archetypal of the artist’s illustrious, iconic and inherently artistic vision.