SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- As a highlight of its 2005 exhibition schedule, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present The Art of Richard Tuttle through October 16, 2005. The first full-scale retrospective of this influential American contemporary artist’s oeuvre, the exhibition brings together more than three hundred significant works from collections worldwide and unifies Tuttle’s four-decade career in the most comprehensive presentation of his work ever mounted. Organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, in close collaboration with the artist, The Art of Richard Tuttle will embark upon an extensive national tour following its San Francisco debut.

The exhibition will showcase a definitive selection of Tuttle’s richly complex and highly diverse output from the mid-1960s to the present including sculptures, paintings, assemblages, works on paper, and artist books. The artist’s distinctive style and its relation to American art since 1965 will be emphasized, summarizing the trajectory of his work and celebrating his singular achievements.

After opening at SFMOMA, The Art of Richard Tuttle will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (November 10, 2005 to February 5, 2006); the Des Moines Art Center (March 18 to June 11, 2006); the Dallas Museum of Art (July 15 to October 8, 2006); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (November 11, 2006 to February 4, 2007); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 18 to June 25, 2007).

Works in the exhibition are drawn from renowned private collections and museums including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and feature a concentration of important Tuttle pieces from SFMOMA’s collection.

A Maverick from the Start - Born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, Richard Tuttle now makes his home in both New York City and Abiquiu, New Mexico. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Tuttle’s work formed an essential part of the groundbreaking developments that reconceived Minimalism by adopting a direct and improvisational process of making art using nontraditional materials. Tuttle is among the most influential of the first-generation Post-Minimalists—a group that includes Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. Tuttle’s art purposefully blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and drawing, and between the artwork and its surrounding space; his use of diverse and unorthodox materials challenges formal restrictions. A concept of independence and sense of joy lie at the heart of each of Tuttle’s works. Taking an unprecedented approach to interpreting his oeuvre, this exhibition reveals the fundamentally democratic attitude informing his art: the openness of his compositions is a tribute to individual curiosity, experimentation, and freedom that has greatly influenced later generations of artists.

Tuttle had his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1965, and was introduced to the greater public in a 1975 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Thirty years have elapsed since that presentation, and his evolving artistic contributions demand a rigorous reinvestigation. His art continues to question concepts of composition and frame, toy with the balance between line and volume, and merge the mystical with the material. While Tuttle’s work has stirred controversy over the years, recently he has won the admiration of a younger generation of artists who have found inspiration in his formal audacity and uncompromising integrity of vision.

“Tuttle’s brilliance lies in his ambition to create a singular object that is as exuberant, as natural, and as real as a living form,” states Grynsztejn. “The ephemeral quality conveyed through much of his work and its authentic emotional charge are characteristics shared with, and normally reserved for, animate things. Much of the liberal formal experimentation that we see in art production today could not have happened without his trailblazing example.”