Richard Tuttle - Consistently on the path to his own identity
Richard Tuttle was born on 12th July 1941 in Rahway, New Jersey. He studied art, literature and philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut from 1959 to 1963 and moved to New York soon after graduating. There he spent a semester at Cooper Union and briefly worked for the US Air Force before being offered an assistant position at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1964, where he also had his first solo exhibition a year later. While Tuttle's early work was still influenced by Agnes Martin, Tony Smith and Ellsworth Kelly, he soon developed his own artistic identity. His artistic oeuvre began with small monochrome reliefs, followed by palm-sized paper cubes decorated with carefully cut-out geometric patterns. He then created geometric-abstract wood reliefs, which took on increasingly eccentric forms in the mid-1960s and were also painted by the artist. In 1983, Tuttle caused a sensation with a wall relief made of twigs, fabric, cords and wire, which he based on the diptych The Crucifixion; The Last Judgement by the Flemish master Jan van Eyck.
Creating something new with minimalist means
As an artist, Richard Tuttle deliberately avoids any categorisation, but his work clearly stands close to minimal art. In this context, the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann speaks of ‘post-minimalist’ art. The artist is primarily concerned with the interrelationship between change and renewal, and achieves impressive effects with simple means and astonishing ideas: When consciously chosen low-quality paper ripples under the coloured strokes, a deliberate three-dimensionality is created. For his first public art installation, Tuttle assembled around 140,000 pieces of white glass and white ceramic to create a large-format mural. When selecting his materials, the artist always favoured new, unused elements without any recognisable flaws; he never referred to used or past items. In the late 1970s, Richard Tuttle also designed textiles such as shirts and trousers. His work has influenced subsequent generations, who took up and pursued his casualist approach.
International success after a difficult start
Richard Tuttle celebrated his first great successes in Europe, but had to wait longer for his breakthrough in his American homeland, whereby today his works on paper in particular are regarded as groundbreaking milestones in American art history. The initial acceptance difficulties in the USA went so far that the curator responsible for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Marcia Tucker, had to resign in 1975 after a scathing assessment by the influential art critic Hilton Kramer in the widely read New York Times. The tide has turned, however, and Richard Tuttle's art has long since been recognised with prizes and awards, including the Aachen International Art Prize in 1998. In 2008 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was appointed to the National Academy of Design in New York in 2012, and since 2013 he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Richard Tuttle lives and works alternately in New York City, Abiqulú, New Mexico and Mount Desert, Maine.
Richard Tuttle - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
