Exhibition Tour with Curator Wells Fray-Smith: Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

Wells Fray-Smith is leading a guided tour of Robert Ryman: The Real Thing at the Barbican Centre on Friday 4 December, starting at 18:30 in the Art Gallery on Level 3. Fray-Smith is the curator of the exhibition, so the tour comes from the person who put it together, with him pointing out highlights and sharing insights into Ryman's life and work as you walk through.

If you're not familiar with Ryman, he emerged in New York in the mid-1950s and spent nearly six decades working almost exclusively in white paint and a square format. He approached every painting as a test to see what would happen, and decided there was never a question of what to paint, only how to paint. The result is a body of work that affirms materials as they are. The Real Thing is his first major UK showing in more than 30 years, bringing together over 60 works from the mid-1950s to the early 2010s. Ryman believed the poetry of painting lay in feeling and that it could only be understood through real, in-person experience: "the real thing... was the only way to do it."

The retrospective is supported by Kenneth C. Griffin & Griffin Catalyst and the Panoptès Collection, and it runs alongside other activities, including the symposium Robert Ryman: A New Way of Seeing and gallery performances by artists such as Sarathy Korwar and tyroneisaacstuart. The tour is one way to get a handle on the whole thing, with the curator walking you through the room and explaining the logic behind the work.

Tickets are £20.50 standard, with a few different concessions: £15.20 for members, £15.50 for students, £11.50 for those on Universal or Pension Credit, and £11 for Art Fund holders. Under 16s go free, and there's a Young Barbican price of £6 for 16 to 29-year-olds. The tour starts at 18:30 on Friday 4 December at the Barbican Art Gallery, Level 3.