Over the last six decades, Richard Tuttle has become one of the most representative American artists of the postwar period, occupying interstitial positions between several genres, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and poetry. He consistently opens new possibilities for a variety of mediums and materials, demonstrating how traditional categories of artmaking can function as starting points for unhindered, open investigations into the functioning of perception and language. His early encounters with artists and artworks associated with pop and minimalism laid the groundwork for a project precipitated on reinvention and change. As Tuttle developed a syntax remarkable for the frankness of its physicality and the poetry of its juxtapositions, he created a space in which a decidedly avant-garde strain of contemporary art could take on the organic sophistication and subtlety of the natural world. At the same time, he began to produce a number of iconic typologies—including stretched and pinned canvases, painted reliefs, and works on paper—in which divisions between object, image, making, abstraction, and observation fell away, leaving in their wake a mode of translating the multiplicity and complexity of life into discrete, often elegant constructions notable for their precision, radical informality, and immediately tangible intimacy.
Since the 1970s, Richard Tuttle (b. 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums throughout the world, including most recently M Woods Museum, Beijing (2019); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2018); Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium (2017); Museo de Arte de Lima (2016); Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016); and Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern, London (2014). In 2005–2007, a retrospective exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art traveled to five additional institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His work is included in over sixty public collections, including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Tuttle lives and works in New York and Abiquiú, New Mexico.
Richard Tuttle
Cleo (history), 2019
fir plywood, pine lattice stripping, wood glue, nails, spray paints,
hot glue, plastic webbing, and staples
35 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 5 inches
(90.2 x 74.9 x 12.7 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Aspect IV, 2015
archival watercolor paper, cardboard backing material,
watercolor, maple wood, and furniture-grade lacquer
32 1/2 x 26 x 1 1/2 inches
(82.6 x 66 x 3.8 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Source of Imagery IV, 1995 - 2010
plywood and wooden block
31 x 20 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches
(78.7 x 52.1 x 24.1 cm)
Richard Tuttle
20 Pearls (1), 2003
acrylic on archival foamcore board and museum board
6 x 10 1/4 x 3/4 inches
(15.2 x 26 x 1.9 cm)
Richard Tuttle
When We Were at Home, 29, 2002
acrylic paint, fir plywood, mat board, pencil and hot glue
16 x 17 1/2 x 3/16 inches
(40.6 x 44.5 x .5 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Fiction Fish I, 6, 1992
fir plywood, pine acrylic, cardboard, tissue and wire, graphite, line
stripping, wood glue, nails, spray paints and oil marker
11 x 5 x 1/4 inches
(27.9 x 12.7 x .6 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Five, 1987
wood, canvas, fabric, acrylic paint, nails, copper wire, and linen thread
40 15/16 x 59 1/16 x 61 13/16 inches
(104 x 150 x 157 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Monkey's Recovery for a Darkened Room, 6, 1983
wood, wire, acrylic, mat board, strong, and cloth
40 x 20 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches
(101.6 x 52.1 x 31.8 cm)
Richard Tuttle
3rd Rope Piece, 1974
cotton and nails
1/2 x 3 x 3/8 inches
(1.3 x 7.6 x 1 cm)
Richard Tuttle
7th Wood Slat, 1974
plywood, latex paint, and nails
36 x 8 x 1/4 inches
(91.4 x 20.3 x .6 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Drift III, 1965
painted wood
26 3/16 x 53 1/8 x 1 1/4 inches
(66.5 x 134.9 x 3.2 cm)
Richard Tuttle
Untitled, 1964
cardboard
6 parts, each:
3 x 3 x 3 inches
(7.6 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm)