The Art of Richard Tuttle

last updated 8 January 2015

Richard Tuttle's art might change your life, said Terry R. Myers in ArtReview. Most of his flimsy wire sculptures and pencil drawings 'œcould fit in the palm of your hand.' But these tiny objects loom unaccountably large in the imagination. Witness a piece of wire fluttering against the white museum wall once, and suddenly hundreds of ordinary objects begin to look equally blessed. Tuttle has been working with spare materials for four decades. But unlike other minimalists who came of age in the 1960s—such as Richard Serra or Donald Judd—he has stayed small, infusing his flimsy scraps of cloth and cubes of paper with an almost spiritual touch. With this retrospective, he is the last of his peers 'œto get his due.'

Tuttle's first major solo show, 30 years ago at the Whitney Museum, was disastrously received, said Julie L. Belcove in W. The reviews were scathing. The show's curator was fired. A man punched out a curator at another museum where Tuttle's work was showing. 'œWhat kind of artist could engender such violent disgust?' In person, Tuttle is quiet, soft-spoken, intense. His art, however, is 'œamong the most groundbreaking and subversive of the past 40 years.' The very small scale of his work and its 'œmodest and ephemeral materials' challenge people to rethink their ideas about art, and, for that matter, the world around them.

The more than 300 works on view are 'œlow in ego and filled with the human touch and a joy in discovery,' said Jack Fischer in the San Jose Mercury News. House (1965), a green fabric piece, consists of two linked H's. It could be a painting or a sculpture; it's exactly the fuzzy, near-pointless distinction between the two that Tuttle means to exploit. A crucial recurring theme is a 'œfaintly wobbly line.' Tuttle will draw a pencil mark on the wall, then follow it with wire, then pin the wire's ends and let the middle float. These pieces are like 'œmutant butterflies lighting on vast white museum walls.'