NEW YORK, NY.- 125 Newbury will present Richard Tuttle: A Distance From This, an exhibition of new works by an artist who has continually expanded the contours of contemporary practice since the 1960s. The exhibition debuts a suite of works Tuttle created over the past year, following a trip to Guatemala in February 2024. At once exuberant and evanescent, Tuttle’s new works are meditations on form, language, and memory as ligaments that bind art and life. A Distance From This will be on view at the gallery’s 395 Broadway location in Tribeca from September 13 to October 26, 2024.

Freely combining elements of sculpture, painting, and drawing into hybrid constructions that defy categorization, Tuttle fashions objects of strange and mysterious beauty. These works celebrate the fragile and the flawed, with ragged edges and tentative lines that bring awkwardness and tenderness into balance. Tuttle’s works traffic in levity while conveying an almost metaphysical gravitas. Piercing our perception, these sculptures are tuning forks for the eye and the mind. The more time one spends with them, the more they render the invisible visible.

Tuttle combines uneven strips of wood, coarsely carved cardboard, rough-hewn planes of scrap metal, rolled or folded sheets of paper, bent rubber tubes, bits of planar Styrofoam, cotton batting, duct tape, and, of course, color in the form of paint, orchestrating the most humble and mundane of materials. His is an art of unlikely couplings, and his sculptures seem to ask: How do things hold together? How do ligaments connect bone to muscle matter, making action possible? A Distance From This comprises a body of work, but it also poses a set of questions about what holds a body together and what holds the universe together.

Tuttle brings his materials into harmonies and intimacies at once uncomfortable and elegant. He coaxes unlikely and dissonant materials into acts of embrace. Rubber and wire kiss, wood and paper coalesce. Tuttle seduces the viewer into moments where space is mysteriously folded in on itself. He involves us in the complexity of a work’s surfaces and interiors, its skin, and its cavities.

The works in Tuttle’s exhibition at 125 Newbury are a summation as well as a turning point. In February 2024, shortly before completing this body of work, Tuttle traveled to various sites of Mayan ruins in Guatemala. That experience is registered in ways both tangible and ineffable. Writing and language proliferate in Mayan architecture, entangling form and space with meaning. Tuttle’s sculptures are similarly imbricated with language. The works begin by summoning language into form. “Are they glyphs?” asks Tuttle of these works. “Do they relate to writing? Are they a writing system? Are they part of a desire to record, maintain, and re-access? What are they trying to record?”

Each of Tuttle’s works is a record of its own making. As he has done since the beginning of his career, Tuttle lays bare the process of his craft. The story of every cut, every brushstroke, every bend and fold, and every twist of the wire remains visible in the form it creates. Tuttle’s works invite us, as viewers, back into that process with him, becoming meditations on how matter and memory are indelibly bound. In Tuttle’s world, an artwork is a relic of its maker, a conduit or trace back to their existence, and a map of the distance from the object to the spirit that animates it.

Richard Tuttle’s (b. 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) direct and seemingly simple deployment of objects and gestures reflects a careful attention to materials and experience. Rejecting the rationality and precision of Minimalism, Tuttle embraced a handmade quality in his invention of forms that emphasize line, shape, color, and space as central concerns. He has resisted medium-specific designations for his work, employing the term drawing to encompass what could otherwise be termed sculpture, painting, collage, installation, and assemblage. Overturning traditional constraints of material, medium, and method, Tuttle’s works sensitize viewers to their perceptions. His working process, in which one series begets the next, is united by a consistent quest to create objects that are expressions of their own totality.