Tag: Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle / My Birthday Puzzle @ Modern Art / March 31 – May 13, 2017

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Richard Tuttle, Releasing: Biologically Poor Endings, IX, 2016, quarter-inch birch plywood, canvas, crayon, acrylic, graphite, acrylic gesso, nails, 68.6 x 66 x 3.5 cm, 27 1/8 x 26 x 1 3/8 ins, courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

There was a time when Richard Tuttle’s understated assemblages were considered by some commentators to be so insubstantial as to be an affront even to minimalism. Better to be made of nothing at all than to be made of almost nothing, they might have said. It might have been the almost-there fragility of his assemblages to which they took exception, cobbled together as they seemed to be, out of the most commonplace craft materials such as string, glue, fabric, scraps of timber, and acrylic paint. At a time when minimalist art was predominantly the slick, machine-made product of an extended process of intellectual refinement, Tuttle’s unkempt art school project rejects seemed outrageously unsophisticated and unfinished. Continue reading “Richard Tuttle / My Birthday Puzzle @ Modern Art / March 31 – May 13, 2017”

200 words #17 / Richard Tuttle

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The Critical Edge I, 2015 fabric, wood, nails, hand-sewn brown thread, graphite; four black MDF panels and four fabric elements 36″ x 12′ 1″ x 3″ (91.4 cm x 368.3 cm x 7.6 cm) © Richard Tuttle, courtesy The Pace Gallery

I use the word minimal when I talk about Richard Tuttle’s work. But this is just a lazy reflex of mine to nominate an artwork according to the quantity of materials used, or evident labour involved in its making. Tuttle’s work deals in poetic economy, commanding the space around it with very little. His assemblages of lo-fi craft materials such as scraps of paper and fabric, string and nails, are sometimes loud agglomerations of unstraight lines and rough edges; not minimal at all but rather concentrated.

Fabric has never been an incidental medium in Tuttle’s work. However, in the current exhibition at Pace London, the artist presents fabric less as a component amongst others, as has been its function in much of Tuttle’s assemblage, but more directly, as the sole component. It celebrates fabric as a medium in itself through subtle detailing, in folds, stitching, and frills. What look like razor sharp seams when seen from a distance reveal the same handmade quality of the artist’s other work.

Tuttle’s fabrics, theatrically presented on black panels, are allowed their natural tendency to fall or fold in certain ways. They acknowledge, through lush detailing and colour combinations, fabric’s rich heritage as clothing.

Richard Tuttle at Pace London

(The next feature article to appear on the website, following an interview with the artist Sean Penlington, will be about Richard Tuttle’s current show at Modern Art, London.)

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art, London

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