Richard Tuttle
1941–
Richard Tuttle’s first solo exhibition, at the prestigious Betty Parsons Gallery in 1965, consisted of painted constructions such as Drift III, a conjoined pair of plywood forms whose wobbly contours attest to the inexact hand-drawn lines of their paper templates. The work hovers between image and object, organic and geometric, and seems to be adrift on the wall, the pale green and mauve units weightlessly lingering like grace notes. Although Tuttle usually avoids identifying the sources for his work, he has explained that the Drift series reminds him of the colored cloud formations he observed while briefly serving in the United States Air Force. The title evokes not the clouds themselves but their wandering movements as they respond to natural forces.
Tuttle’s ten-year survey exhibition at the Whitney in 1975 garnered a host of negative reviews from the conservative art establishment, whose vituperation focused on the works’ minuteness and offhanded presentation; one critic complained that after seeing the exhibition he was compelled to examine the hairline cracks in the gallery wall. But Tuttle’s art is driven by such dramas as hairline cracks, creases in fabric, or a wavering graphite trace precisely because they sensitize the viewer’s eye.
Since then Tuttle has gained a reputation as an artist of poetry and quietude, even of disappearance, because his work is slight in scale if not always small in size, and made from humble, ephemeral materials such as rope, cardboard, twigs, and florist’s wire. The artist has said that he considers the installation of delicate objects like Drift III, which often lie in the middle of the gallery floor or hang awkwardly high or low on the wall, to be “the other half of the work.”
Introduction
Richard Dean Tuttle (born July 12, 1941) is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, casual, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of formats, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist’s books to installation and furniture. He lives and works in New York City, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.
Wikidata identifier
Q836743
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 9, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, installation artist, painter, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500116277
Names
Richard Tuttle
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 9, 2025.
