Richard Tuttle
Born
1941, Rahway, NJ
Education
BA, Trinity College,
Hartford, CT
Lives and Works
New Mexico & New York, NY
Media & Materials
drawing, painting,
printmaking, sculpture
Biography
Although some of Richard
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 sculpture
(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, and Styrofoam. A lover
of books and printed matter,
Tuttle has created artist’s
books, collaborated on the
design of exhibition catalogs,
and is a consummate
printmaker.
“Before I went to kindergarten
I really wanted to be an artist.
Not that I knew what being an
artist was, but on the first day of
kindergarten the teacher handed
out the paper and the colored
crayons. And I just connected in
my brain that this was the first
day of my life, and that going to
school was the start of everything
that was important to me. I
remember the drawing to this
moment. I took a pencil and I just
made this horizon line, and then
I took the colored pencils and I
made a rainbow there.”
Above: Village III, Sculpture, 2004. Stainless
steel, rebar, and industrial oil paint, 60 x 84 x
24½" (152 x 213 x 61 cm) overall. Collection Mr.
and Mrs. Peter Shaw, Philadelphia. Courtesy
Sperone Westwater, New York. Right: Village I,
Sculpture I, 2003. Steel, iron, wire, piñon, and
juniper wood, 60 x 16 x 31" (152 x 41 x 61 cm).
Collection Deedie and Rusty Rose, Dallas,
Texas.
“When I had my first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery when I was twenty-three
or so, I looked over on the wall and saw a piece called Hill. And it was kind of
the same rainbow which the graphite line had changed into. It was a big, startling moment to me because that really was the first day of my life in a way and
quite a way from kindergarten, which I had mistakenly thought was the first
day, to my show in a New York gallery.
“I was doing white paper octagonals on a wall at a museum in Dallas. And the
critic came along and made mock introductions, ‘Oh, this is Richard Tuttle.
He’s interested in impermanence in the arts.’ And she said that to Betty, and
Betty just immediately snapped back, ‘What’s more permanent than the invisible?’ It fits in with the whole line that in any art form there has to be an accounting of its opposite condition. If you’re going to be a visual artist, then there
has to be something in the work that accounts for the possibility of the invisible,
the opposite of the visual experience.”
