Richard Tuttle is an influential contemporary American artist. One of the most lyrical and spiritually-minded of contemporary artists, Richard Tuttle has produced a body of work that is as difficult to categorize as it is intuitively pleasurable to engage with. Coming of age in the era of Conceptual and Minimalist art in North America, he contributed much to both movements, but incorporated a range of artisanal techniques into his practice.
Background
Richard Tuttle was born in 1941 in Rahway, New Jersey, United States. At the age of five, Richard Tuttle realized the profound impact which art would have on his experience of the world. In an interview with curator Molly Donovan, Tuttle recalls sitting in his childhood living room and watching his grandfather draw from across the room, and being mesmerized by the harmony he sensed between "eye/brain, hand, and heart/spirit." By his first day of kindergarten, Tuttle knew that he too would be an artist: when the teacher passed out paper and a box of crayons, he remembers, it felt like the first day of his life. He believes that spirit of the work he created as a very young child continues to surface throughout his practice.
Growing up in Rahway, New Jersey, Tuttle was often taken by his mother to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he loved viewing the Assyrian winged bulls. As he circled the golden sculptures, the young artist-to-be was amazed by how his movement around the figures seemed to change the number of legs they possessed. Tuttle cites this experience as an early example of his exposure to the possibility of accessing the invisible through art: its capacity to allow us into a hidden space, beyond everyday perception.
Education
Although Tuttle always wanted to attend art school, his parents disapproved, and under familial pressure he decided to join the Air Force. Despite his parent's disapproval, Tuttle ultimately went on to study art, philosophy, and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The majority of his cohort were not concerned with contemporary art, but when the curator Sam Wagstaff visited his school, Tuttle recalls that pupil and mentor instinctively gravitated towards one another. Wagstaff taught Tuttle everything he had learned from the great scholar of Renaissance art Richard Offner, while Tuttle expanded his frame of creative reference by working on theater sets and editing a literary magazine.
On graduation, Tuttle made the decision many young artists had made before him, and moved in 1964 to New York City. He worked as an assistant at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and after just a year of employment was given his first solo exhibition at the Gallery. One evening, Tuttle recalls seeing his drawing Hill from across the gallery space, and realizing that the piece was directly influenced by the first drawing he had made in kindergarten.
Through Parsons, Tuttle met the Minimalist artist Agnes Martin, who would become a close friend and mentor. Shortly after their introduction in 1964 Tuttle purchased one of her drawings, a work which he still owns today. He has stated that Martin's tenacious energy allowed her to embody the intuitive approach and 'all-over' compositional style of Abstract Expressionism while simultaneously spearheading the next significant movement in modern art, through her repetitive, line-based drawings and paintings.
In 1975, Tuttle's first survey exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by the critic and gallerist Marcia Tucker. The exhibition focused heavily on Tuttle's non-traditional 'drawings' composed from string laid out on the floor, and received such negative reviews that Tucker was fired for overseeing what critics deemed "a pathetic attempt to master [the gallery's] vast empty space." Despite these carping assessments, both artist and critic would go on to find acclaim, with Tucker opening the New Museum for Contemporary Art in 1977, and Tuttle now recognized as one of the most significant North-American artists of his generation.
Since his 1975 exhibition, Tuttle has built up a body of work defined by its depth and diversity. Hard to pin down to any one movement or stylistic categorization, his practice has evolved a visual language all of its his own. Using everyday materials - string, graph-paper, wire mesh, bubble wrap, cardboard, plywood - Tuttle creates intriguing works in which conceptual rigor and formal effervescence meet. In sharp contrast to the tendency of his male contemporaries to employ raw industrial materials on a grand scale Tuttle's poetic sensibility finds expression in delicate, ephemeral works often no larger than paper-weights.
Speaking about what drives his work, Tuttle often refers to his interest in defining the 'invisible'; using visual, tangible forms to hint at the forms that lie just beyond the thresholds of our sensory perception. This near-spiritual pursuit is reflected in works not intended to be perceived exactly as they are, but as gestures towards hidden forms and presences. It is perhaps for this reason that some of his works seem underwhelming on first encounter. For an early exhibition at the Whitney, Tuttle placed a number of small works around the gallery, including a coffee stirrer with a touch of paint on its tip exhibited by itself on a 40-foot wall.
Today, Tuttle splits his time between New York City, Abiquiú in New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine, traveling with his wife, poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Partly as a result of their time in New Mexico, Tuttle has become interested in so-called 'vibrational medicine', an alternative therapeutic system which holds that the human body takes on three forms: the physical, the "etheric", and the "astrospheric" bodies, affirming Tuttle's belief that human beings are "in fact mostly light." Despite these esoteric beliefs, Tuttle continues to hold, as he has throughout his career, that art first and foremost serves society.
In reference to a 2005 retrospective exhibition of his work held at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuttle spoke of defining a new genre of art that "aspires toward a total living art that people can use to make their lives better." In particular, Tuttle is an advocate of the capacity of art to heal. When in New York, Tuttle continues to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art once a week, citing the Met as a tremendous accessible public resource.
During the early part of his career, Tuttle was amongst various artists, now associated mainly with Conceptualism, who shifted public perceptions of what art could be, in both physical and conceptual terms. No longer restricted to categories such as 'painting' and 'sculpture', art - Tuttle's art - could instead be the document of a process or thought, a simple form perhaps constructed from very simple materials, but which gestured towards something ineffable, beyond the physical boundaries of what was presented.
Tuttle dematerialized art, making the concept conveyed as significant as the physical or visual content of the artwork. At the same time, there is a visual warmth and homely materiality to much of Tuttle's work. This evident love of the quotidian counterbalances the philosophical imperatives of Tuttle's practice, resulting in a body of work that is both inviting and intriguing to the viewer.
Tuttle’s compositions are formed through the carefully considered relationships between form, color, and material, generating a universe of intimate connections bridging the gaps between art, life, and thought.
Quotations:
“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. A painting or a sculpture really exists somewhere between itself, what it is, and what it is not — you know, the very thing. And how the artist engineers or manages that is the question.”
Membership
In 2012, Richard was elected to the National Academy and in 2013 he was invited to become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Interests
calligraphy, poetry, and language
Connections
Tuttle is married to the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. For their residence in Abiquiú, New Mexico, they commissioned architect Steven Holl to design a 1,300-square-foot guest cottage, built between 2001 and 2005.