CHICAGO, IL.- The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents The Art of Richard Tuttle, the first fullscale retrospective of this influential American contemporary artist, through February 4, 2007. 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. The exhibition showcases a definitive selection of Tuttle’s richly complex and highly diverse work from the mid1960s 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 are emphasized, summarizing the trajectory of his work and celebrating his singular achievements. The Art of Richard Tuttle is organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art (SFMOMA), in close collaboration with the artist.

"Richard Tuttle has proven to be a highly influential figure for a younger generation of artists who have been drawn to the subtlety, modest scale, and sense of experimentation that have characterized his work, says Elizabeth Smith, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at the MCA. "Describing himself as someone who 'works around the edges of things,' Tuttle has consistently aimed to break down conventional artistic categories and rethink the way objects communicate purpose and meaning."

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; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the SFMOMA; and the MCA. Several works in the exhibition are also being lent from private collections in Chicago.

A Maverick from the Start - Born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, Richard Tuttle now makes his home in both New York City and New Mexico. Beginning in the mid1960s, 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 firstgeneration PostMinimalists 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, the 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.

An Exhibition of Unequaled Scope - The presentation in The Art of Richard Tuttle is essentially chronological, alternating concentrations of works from a single series with displays combining two or three related bodies of work. The design of the exhibition allows viewers to understand Tuttle’s methodology, emphasizing the unifying principles in his work: his distinct use of line, his explorations of scale, the pendulum swing between structural complexity and simplicity, and the artist’s precise attention to the work’s relationship to the wall. The Art of Richard Tuttle is the first to convey these unifying threads, as previous exhibitions have focused on discrete bodies of work and have not cited correspondences within Tuttle’s overall production.

The exhibition begins with Tuttle’s eccentrically-shaped paintedwood reliefs of the mid1960s, moving through his unstretched, shapedanddyed canvases to his glyphlike tin constructions. It continues with a selection of his wire pieces (nearly invisible wires installed in lyrical loops on a wall marked with pencil lines and cast shadows); multimedia assemblages made in the 1980s (Monkey’s Recovery, and the series of freestanding sculptures called Floor Drawings). The exhibition next explores Tuttle’s return to intimatesized work (Line Pieces) and wallsize installations (Inside the Still Pure Form) from the early 1990s, followed by his low relief wallbound pieces (New Mexico/New York, Whiteness, Two with Any Two, Waferboard) and the recent Twenty Pearls series. A large selection of Tuttle’s drawings and artist books are also included in the exhibition.

The Art of Richard Tuttle was organized by the SFMOMA, when it originally opened in July 2005. After the MCA, the exhibition travels to its final venue, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (April 8 to July 30, 2007).