NEW YORK, NY.- Pace is presenting an exhibition of new works by Richard Tuttle at 510 West 25th Street. Coinciding with Tuttle’s exhibition of ninety-four drawings from the 1970s on view at Pace’s neighboring headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, this exhibition features over twenty new works produced over the summer of 2019 at the artist’s new studio in Maine. Split into three series, Days, Muses, and Stars, these works explore the relationship between what is directly portrayed through picture making and the act of perception. Like all of Tuttle’s work, these new pieces reveal his continuous ability to create a unique visual language that defies categorization and blurs the boundaries between drawing, sculpture, and painting. Richard Tuttle: Days, Muses and Stars is on view through December 21, 2019.
The genesis for Richard Tuttle: Days, Muses and Stars stemmed from his time spent at his recently acquired property in Mount Desert, Maine. His expansive new studio and the vast surrounding landscape energized Tuttle with an influx of new ideas, resulting in one of the most productive and fertile times of his artistic career.
Comprised largely of plywood and spray paint, these new assemblages draw on a range of influences from the nine muses in Greek mythology, after which some of the works are titled, to broader themes concerning nature and the cosmos.
Richard Tuttle has revolutionized the landscape of contemporary art, challenging rules and notions of genre and media. His work exceeds rational determinations, sensitizing viewers to perception and the unconscious, and engages aspects of painting, drawing, sculpture, bookmaking, printmaking, and installation.
Exposed to the Pop movement and the beginnings of Minimalism as a young artist, Tuttle began to explore the possibilities of material and form freed from historical allusion and precedent. Early investigations into the merging of painting and sculpture are evident in his “Constructed” paintings which exist in a liminal space between mediums. For Tuttle, the 1980s and 1990s marked wider experimentation with material and a move toward inthe-round constructions. He began incorporating the frame as an element in his compositions, collapsing the boundaries between the artwork and its surrounding space.
Tuttle’s engagement with scale, light, and systems of display have endured throughout his oeuvre and can be seen in his attention to marginal spaces such as floors, corners, and over door frames. Rejecting the rationality and precision of Minimalism, Tuttle embraced a handmade quality and the invention of forms that emphasize the occupation of these spaces along with volume. Over the course of his career, he has continued to overturn traditional constraints of material, medium, and method that engage a variety of traditional and non-traditional processes such as in his wire, small-scale collage, dyed cloth, and octagonal pieces. The beauty and poetry that Tuttle draws out of everyday materials can be experienced in works that exist in the present moment, reflect the fragility of the world, and allow for individual experiences of perception.
