The day my mother touched Robert Ryman

“The Day My Mother Touched Robert Ryman” by Stefan Sulzer interweaves personal memory with art-historical reflection.

At its center is the moment when Sulzer’s mother, visiting the Dia Art Foundation, touched the surface of a Robert Ryman painting—a small, intimate gesture that raises questions about perception, distance, and the appropriation of art. The book expands this anecdote into a meditation on Ryman’s radically reduced painting and on emptiness as an aesthetic and philosophical principle. Its design and typography emphasize white space as a medium in its own right; in a special limited edition, each copy was literally touched by the author’s mother, turning the event itself into part of the publication.