LONDON.- Modern Art opened on March 4th two consecutive exhibitions by Richard Tuttle, together forming a large-scale solo presentation of both new and historical work in Tuttle’s sixth showing with the gallery. The exhibition will continue through April 6th, 2023.

The first part is a restaging of Tuttle’s historical installation Village V, which is one of a larger constellation of ‘Village’ works by Tuttle. Each containing a different iteration of the same exhibition components - a central sculpture and three groups of drawings – Tuttle’s Villages are about the reciprocated exploration between sculpture and drawing. Originally exhibited in 2004 at the Drawing Center, New York, Village V was subsequently shown on three further occasions between 2006 and 2011 at Aspen Art Museum, Sperone Westwater, New York and Hugh Lane, Dublin. Almost two decades after its conception, Modern Art’s showing of the work offers a revisiting of Tuttle’s thinking and practice at the time. In its original iteration, Village V was conceived as part of a wider move in Tuttle’s practice away from organising principles based on categories and criteria, towards ideas of groupings, or ‘villages’ where individual entities can exist in relation to one another, being in this sense both discrete and together, as a community. This move coincides with Tuttle’s refusal of the separation of disciplines, or indeed the notion of discipline itself, choosing instead to work within a merging of parameters, finding a freedom from confines in thought and practice.

Village V, as such, is an interrogation of the idea of drawing, which is in fact a question that can be considered to underpin Tuttle’s entire oeuvre. The installation is made up of repeated markings across the walls in blue, green, yellow and silver, with a grouping of framed and unframed works mounted upon it. Some two-dimensional, others protruding from the wall, these pieces are made from a range of traditional and non-traditional materials including graphite, watercolour, charcoal, and coloured pencils, alongside wood, string, and Styrofoam. Playing with composition and the frame in this way, Tuttle treats the walls as a vehicle for drawing to take place, while undermining the function of framing upon it as a neutral surface. About Village V, Tuttle states, “We must study that confinement to expand the canon... to see how it breaks its own canon... this is an act of drawing”. Through his sensitivity to the poetics of colour, shadow and light, and the intimacy with which he responds to material in space, Tuttle’s Village V constitutes both a delicate exploration of what drawing can be, as well as a broader meditation on the making and unmaking of conceptual and formal paradigms.

Born in 1941, Richard Tuttle currently lives and works in Abiquiu, New Mexico, New York City and Mount Desert, Maine. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of the Post-Minimalist tradition. Through his iconic language of modesty and idiosyncrasy, Tuttle’s work has invented a poetics of space and materiality influencing subsequent generations in untold ways. Since his first exhibition in 1965 at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, his work has been the subject of more than two hundred solo exhibitions. His work was included in the Venice Biennale in 1976, 1997 and 2001, Documenta in 1972, 1977 and 1982, and the Whitney Biennial of American Art in 1977, 1987 and 2000.

In London in 2014, Richard Tuttle undertook the Turbine Hall commission for Tate Modern, I Don’t Know . 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. Tuttle’s work can be found in over 45 major public collections all over the world.

Other recent solo exhibitions have taken place at such institutions as Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA (2022); Mu.ZEE, Oostende, Belgium (2017); Proyecto amil and Museo de Arte de Lima (mali), Lima, Peru (2016); The Critical Edge, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA (2016); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland (2016); Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, MO, USA (2015); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 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); Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2005); Drawing Center, New York, USA, travelled to Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2004 – 2006).