LONDON.- Modern Art is presenting an exhibition of new works by Richard Tuttle. This is his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. A book published for this occasion including Tuttle’s new work alongside a series of his corresponding poems accompanies the exhibition.
Titled TheStars, Tuttle’s new body of sculptures for Modern Art were made during the summer of 2019 at his home and studio in Mount Desert, Maine. The works are small in scale, each sculpture’s spontaneous construction belying an unparalleled potency and elegance. As such, TheStars bears a clear resemblance to some of Tuttle’s early work from the 1970s, such as his iconic Rope Piece (1974), which came to typify his bold approach to scale. As well as in their size, the modest, simple materials employed in TheStars share the same essence characteristic of the sculptural language used throughout Tuttle’s career. Made predominantly from plywood, paint, paper and metal wire, each work sits atop its own hand-made shelf, annotated by Tuttle with its particular title, and secured to the wall with a single nail. Thus in scale, material and formal arrangement, TheStars marks a new stage in the continued evolution of Tuttle’s distinctive vocabulary whilst also reflecting something of its origins. This new series – like all Tuttle’s work – remains deeply sensitised to the interplay between the most granular, material experiences and a sense of an immense, perhaps cosmic, ambitious unknowability.
Richard Tuttle was born in 1941 in Rahway, New Jersey. He lives and works in New York City, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine. His contribution to the development of Postminimalist art discourse is considered to be among the most significant. Working across mediums, scales, artistic categories, and historical traditions, Tuttle’s work is revered for its command of space, and its ability to articulate a poetics of materiality through its own vernacular of modesty and idiosyncracy. Since his first exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1965, his work has been the subject of over two hundred solo exhibitions internationally, and numerous monographic books.
In London in 2014, Richard Tuttle undertook the Turbine Hall commission for Tate Modern, I Don’t Know or The Weave of Textile Language, which coincided with the retrospective solo exhibition The Weave of Textile Language at the Whitechapel Gallery. The survey exhibition The Art of Richard Tuttle was organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA, in 2005, from where it travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, USA, Dallas Museum of Art, USA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA, through 2007.
Other solo exhibitions of Richard Tuttle’s work have taken place at institutions including M WOODS, Beijing, China (2019); Mu.ZEE, Oostende, Belgium (2017); De Hallen Haarlem, Haarlem, Netherlands (2017); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2016); Proyecto AMIL and Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Lima, Peru (2016); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA (2016); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2016); Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, MO, USA (2015); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2012); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2012); Kunstverein Munich, Germany (2012); Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Ireland (2010 – 2011); Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland (2008); CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2005); Drawing Center, New York, USA, travelled to Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2004 – 2006); Stiftung Schleswig Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig, Germany (2000); and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2001).
