Richard Tuttle was born
in Rahway, New Jersey in 1941, and lives and works in New Mexico
and New York. He received a BA from Trinity College, Hartford,
Connecticut. Although
most
of
Tuttle’s
prolific artistic output since he began his career in the 1960s
has taken
the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his
work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive
scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions
of modernist sculptural practice (defined by grand heroic gestures,
monumental scale, and the ‘macho’ materials of steel,
marble, and bronze) and instead creates small, eccentrically playful
objects in decidedly humble, even ‘pathetic’ materials
such as paper, rope, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble
wrap, nails, Styrofoam, and plywood. Tuttle also manipulates the
space in which his objects exist, placing them unnaturally high
or oddly low on a wall, forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate
the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies. Tuttle
uses directed light and shadow to further define his objects and
their space. Influences on his work include calligraphy (he has
a strong interest in the intrinsic power of line), poetry, and
language. A lover of books and printed matter, Tuttle has created
artist’s books, collaborated on the design of exhibition
catalogues, and is a consummate printmaker. Richard Tuttle received
a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Skowhegan
Medal for Sculpture. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
ICA Philadelphia; Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Centro Galego de
Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; and the Museu
Serralvesin, Porto, Portugal. SFMoMA is the organizer of a 2005
Tuttle retrospective.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Sperone Westwater, New York
Richard Tuttle on the Art21 blog |
