ART-PRESENTATION: Richard Tuttle-basis, 70s Drawings
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 U.S.A., he took and contributed much to both movements, but incorporated a range of artisanal techniques into his practice – including printmaking and weaving – alien to the austere credos of his peers. The result is an art which is both esoteric and immediate in its appeal, both visually pleasurable and conceptually sophisticated, alluding to the everyday world of the materials used to compose it while simultaneously gesturing towards an ineffable or dreamlike plane of being only accessible through creative experience.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive
An exhibition of seminal works by Richard Tuttle is on presentation in New York. The exhibition “Basis, 70s Drawings”, is split into two bodies of work from the early and late 1970s. Richard Tuttle’s works of this period defied categorization and went against the monumentalizing aesthetic and austere industrial precision of much art at the time through their modest scale, emphasis on the artist’s idiosyncratic touch, and embrace of everyday, humble materials. Bringing together his series of 94 “basis” drawings and the sculpture “8th Wood Slat “ (1974), the exhibition offers a unique glimpse into the formative years of Tuttle’s groundbreaking creative process, which elevated the perception of drawing to that of painting and sculpture. Presented together for the first time, these elegantly elemental works operate as visual poems that convey the artist’s open mind and freshness of vision in the 1970s. As evinced by their vivid colors, intimate scale, and sustained experimentation with line, the works in “Richard Tuttle: Basis, 70s Drawings” are akin in style to the artist’s most renowned pieces. Like all of Tuttle’s oeuvre, they seek to challenge our preconceived notions on the nature of art and how we experience it. “In some sense, an artist is…a true philosopher. You can go to the limit of any and all disciplines.” His two sets of drawings (41 from the early ‘70s and 53 from the late ‘70s) articulate a visual vocabulary that would form the basis of much of his later work of the ‘80s, including the series “Loose Leaf Notebook Drawings,” “India Work,” and “Hong Kong Set.” They are part of Tuttle’s then-controversial reinvention of the medium: drawing as a performative act occurring within the gallery space and through the use of materials deemed extraneous to the arts. Created soon after the pinnacle of Minimalism, which disrupted the strict distinction between painting and sculpture, the works in this exhibition similarly break down the boundaries between drawing and sculpture. The series achieves this by combining bright watercolors with collage and assemblage, producing a pronounced tactile quality. The artist’s carefully designed shadowbox frames, at first in ash wood and subsequently overlaid in gold leaf, extend this breakdown of boundaries to the work’s presentation and further blur the line separating the work of art from the realm of everyday objects. In a performative act that eroded the medium specificity and autonomy of sculpture, Tuttle himself installed “8th Wood Slat” (the last of 8 thin, plywood trapezoids the artist made in 1974) in this exhibition. The wall-bound, low-relief brings the viewer’s attention to the marginal and liminal spaces of the gallery by acting as both a dividing marker and hinge between these spaces. In this manner, Tuttle invites audiences to reconsider the relationship between their bodies and the gallery space, and between their routinized trajectories through architecture.
Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, Duration 25/10-21/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com
