This work will be listed as catalogue number RR.82.431 in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonne being organized by David Gray.

Courier is one of a group of about nine paintings from the same period, including Ledger (1982, Tate), exhibited at the Mayor Gallery in late 1982.

On these works, Robert Ryman has stated:

“There were a number of those. They were on the fiberglass panels that I began working with at that time. These were different from the fiberglass that I'd used in the past. This was a sandwich of fiberglass sheets with an aluminum honeycomb core, which gave it a rigidity and strength. But also, you could get a relatively thin panel from it, and it was impervious to heat and moisture. You didn't have to worry about it warping. I did a number of paintings on these panels, various sizes and various paints, Enamelac and oil, even acrylic I think. The Modern has a painting which is similar…but the one they have is quite different in a particular way. It was the only one I ever did like that. It's supposed to be hung higher than most paintings, above eye level. I think I wrote that on the back, I don't remember. It was shown in Paris, originally, and then the Modern got it…I can't even remember how. Anyway, it was the only one I painted that was to hang above eye level.

Well, this opened up some possibilities that I hadn't worked with before: the fasteners became much more of a structural part of the painting. Aside from being visible, they developed in a surprising, quite radical way; they lengthened and came off the wall an inch or so. So, I had the color of the metal which was sometimes polished, sometimes brushed, depending on how the light was going to work with it; and then I had the fiberglass which was kind of greenish. I liked the color very much—kind of a light yellowish-green color. Sometimes it was totally covered, sometimes not. Then I had the edge which was the honeycomb, which I mostly covered, at that time, with redwood (see also Ledger, 1982). So you had a red edge to the painting. It gave me a lot of elements to work with compositionally.

I had [the brackets] made. I would figure out the size and scale of them, do drawings, and have them made, usually out of aluminum because that was lighter, and also it was a nicer metal. Aluminum is really a very soft-feeling metal. They were made out of steel a few times, but mosty aluminum. In fact I have the drawings for all of those fasteners. They're not art drawings; they're just technical drawings. But a folder of them was shown at Matthew Marks Gallery. I think it was one of those opening shows he did. These brackets just opened up more possibilities, because there are so many things to work with. [The fiberglass] was made to size. They couldn't make one piece any larger than about 4 feet. If you went larger than that, it had to be in sections, which some of my paintings were. That always presented a problem because you had a seam. And of course in my work, a seam is a line. In fact, I used that in one of my paintings later. It's called Director. It has a seam that runs right across the centre of the painting. Anyway, I painted up to the seam, and I left it. Because I knew if I painted it over, it would read as a construction line. But by leaving it open, it became literally a line, and so there was no problem, really. But to try and hide it was difficult. The painting was shown at Peder Bonnier when he first opened his public gallery in New York. It looked like a band was going across the centre of the painting, which was where the paint had stopped.”

Published in Robert Storr, Robert Ryman, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), p. 172.