The museum of contemporary art - The Art of Richard Tuttle

Culling generously from a career that spans more than 40 years, The Art of Richard Tuttle brings to MOCA a lifetime of diverse and seminal work from one of the masters of elemental art. Beginning with a controversial debut in 1965, at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, Tuttle has gone on to establish himself as an acute observer and facilitator of the mundanely abstract. His varied wealth of sculptures, paintings, assemblages, and everything in between relies on the most “household” of materials—wire, rope, plywood, waferboard, and pipe, to name a few—to call into focus the universe’s minute shapes and inconsistencies. Implementing subtleties like shadow and wrinkles, much of his work relies on context, with some pieces reconstructed anew at each venue.

Though Tuttle’s themes persist over the years, the scope of this retrospective is an ambitious and unprecedented one, guiding the viewer through each decade as the artist consistently re-imagines his reductive style. From oddly shaped geometric pieces such as Drift III (1965), made from acrylic paint on plywood, to his Wire Pieces (1972), which juxtaposes lengths of wire with shadows and hand-drawn lines, his work emerged early on as solidly Post-Minimalist, integrating nontraditional media with facile shapes. The eighties saw him take on a wider range of materials, constructions, and forms, though he returned to a simpler palette and aesthetic language afterwards. The low-relief New Mexico, New York series (1998) (he splits his time between the two states) features earthy acrylic paint on thin plywood, with shapes resembling droopy envelopes and waving flags. Tuttle’s recent 20 Pearls (2003), a response to the September 11th attacks, relates a similar, personal touch: a delicate bouquet of natural colors and outlines, beautifully evoking something thin and transitory. Exhibition organizer and SFMOMA Curator of Painting and Sculpture Madeleine Grynsztejn writes, “Aesthetic pleasure itself is the subject of these pieces, and it is distilled in their very realization.”

The Art of Richard Tuttle at MOCA is the sixth and final stop of an exhibition that began almost two years ago. By far, the most comprehensive review of Tuttle’s career to date, it offers a rare and necessary insight into a true provocateur of contemporary art.