The Day My Mother Touched Robert Ryman

"The end of art is not the end," Ad Reinhardt once said. The book by Stefan Sulzer tells the story of a visit by the author's mother to the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, NY to see Ryman's white paintings. There, the mother was so taken by the elegant simplicity of Ryman's paintings that she ran her hand slowly but intently over one of the paintings. Stefan Sulzer combines this story with statements and information about Ryman's work to create a selective and poetic narrative about the analytical and emotional reception of art. The design of the book is based on strategies that Ryman uses in his own work. The excessive use of white space creates a subtle and hermetic object linked to a statement from the text: «Mallarmé spoke of the white of the page as a void that gives relief from the intensity marked by the blackness of the print .