The Brooklyn Rail

Ethan Ryman’s exhibition at the Lockwood Gallery, Four Years Built, consists of variegated modular and photo-sculptural box and planar wooden constructions. Although some of the works’ elements convey the influence of Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, they are indicative of a genuine advance beyond the constraints of Minimalist aesthetics. Collectively, Ryman’s units, painted in smooth umber, burgundy, amber, and crème rectangle stripes and square tracts, attest to the box construction as a discrete medium—one whose planar essence distinguishes it from painting, sculpture in the round, and even that which Guggenheim curator Daniel Robbins, in two consecutive exhibitions (viz., the American Federation of Arts’s circulating 1963–64 Contemporary Wall Sculpture and the RISD Museum’s 1965 Contemporary Boxes and Wall Sculpture) deemed “wall sculpture.” Where, as Robbins writes in the foreword to the 1963–64 catalogue, wall sculpture’s “unique factor” consists in “the palpability of an art form that injects itself into real space while simultaneously demanding from a wall the essential support of boundary and spatial definition once traditionally provided by architecture,” the box construction’s formal scheme involves further constraints—chiefly, that of the three-dimensional quadrilateral plane, a consequence of the presence of the wall.

The box construction’s planes, which reject curvilinear and smooth space, are the foundational units underlying Ryman’s art practice. Often, Ryman’s projected vectors are joined at seemingly perpendicular angles that upon closer observation are slightly askew. Others jut from the wall towards the viewer, with an aluminum hinge that allows the acutely positioned faces to protrude at dramatic intersections. With the exception of Series: Line Factory, Part 2 - Window #13 (2024–25), where a honeycomb repository of vertical bars and puce panels are insulated within a window-like alabaster encasement, most of Ryman’s constructions are not boxes proper. Most are more akin to shelves, prototypes, or the skeletal structure of a crate. Their flat surfaces are glossed with complementary color bands, none of which are terribly bright. The highly inventive Perfect Flat Construction #6 (2023) consists of four modular elements. The leftmost two units fit plane faces, painted in chestnut, marigold, and honey rectangles, into askew L-faced screens. The rightmost twin pieces are horizontal plywood verticals, one being a thin, straw-like onyx strip, the other a cold gray plank.

In between each module, Ryman includes flat-faced dye-sublimation prints. In creating these works, Ryman photographs the antecedent modular constructions head-on. The printed imagery, now a smoothened two-dimensional surface texture, is set into plywood. Ryman often carves the wood into an irregular polygon or rhombus, its aberrant form exacerbated by the photographic imagery of trapezoids and blazoned rectangles, each quadrated beside one another as a patchwork limned into the foreground-cum-background. In works like Untitled Still Life With Gray Frame (2023), dissolving bands of brick and blooming russet bisect the wine and maroon color field blocks. These photo-sculptural tableaus, in which the image is printed into, and thus of a piece with, the surface stand in stark contrast to the three-dimensional projectile modules.

In the earlier “Square Studies” series, Ryman’s floating frames scaffold color pencil blocks of diaphanous squares, each painted a uniform color. In the “Line Factory, Part 2 – Ten Windows” series, Ryman’s constructions grow significantly more complex. On the interior faces of the elbow-shaped modules, tightly modeled and hard-edged shapes dent into the framing silvery negative space.

Chronologically reviewed, one readily espies significant progression in Ryman’s continued formalist exercise. His later fabricated models neither traffic in the sleek and simple palette reduction one might find in Mon Levinson’s boxes nor the mark-replete, intentionally “casualist” units of his brother, Cordy Ryman. Nor is Ethan a cosmologist or taxonomist the likes of Joseph Cornell and Ilse Getz. With the latter two artists’ Victorian boxes, rife with parchment, dolls, or newspaper clippings steeped in nostalgia and symbolist reverie, the reliquary form licenses biography-attuned memorializing. Ryman is more so a classical formalist, rending the box into an architectural posit rife for planar deconstruction. Ryman does for the box construction what Morris Louis and Frank Stella did for the canvas and Anthony Caro for sculpture—revealing, by means of the form itself, its medium-specific essence. Ryman demonstrates that the box construction is, unlike sculpture in the round, not conditioned by sheer three-dimensionality but by planar construction. As Johann Gottfried von Herder outlines in his 1778 Sculpture, that sculpture in the round is “solid, rounded, [and] three-dimensional” means that its ambulatory viewer’s presumed points of observation comport to the points that can be circumscribed around the object. Painting’s surface depth, on the other hand, can be arrayed across a surface from a static position. Ryman’s constructions do precipitate some movement on behalf of the viewer, but not in the round; one instead responds to the wall’s spatial restriction, the sculpture’s “round” halved into a hemisphere.

With his planar constructions, Ryman’s architectonic practice evinces perpendicular oblongs, the box form opened and cleaved into segments. These segments are pieced together with askance abutments that underscore the structure’s built quality. Though, like his brother, Cordy, Ethan’s boxes are provisional, open to being mounted in various permutations, the gradient faces’ angular arrangements are fixed into unconventional slants. In Ethan’s work, environmental arrangement is of lesser importance than the space within which the formalist exercise takes place: i.e., built-out space, as such.

One finds something of conceptual antecedent in Richard Artschwager’s boxes and laminate wood sculptures. However, throughout his work, Artschwager’s parodic stance means that he remains anchored to the build object. Ryman does not focus on the nature of a constructed object but its conditioning environment, obviating it from worldly reference so as to treat the consequent enclosure as a purely formal operation. Ryman most successfully achieves this in his recent work. Ryman’s 2022 “Frontier” and “Square Study” series duplicate the quadrilateral form of the support by penciling its structure with mauve, crimson, tan, and moss squares that dance along the pitch-black picture plane’s surface; in this doubling, both of Ryman’s earlier series arguably attend to the structure-as-canvas rather than as-enclosure. But in his subsequent series, such as “Line Factory” and “Still Life,” Ryman redirects his attention to planar space, adjusting his formalist line of inquiry such that content aptly matches form. In these impressively executed works, Ryman assiduously succeeds in undertaking an enormously interesting endeavor that demonstrates formalism’s continued relevance.