Artist Abstract:
For over sixty years, Richard Tuttle’s work has comprised radically minimal gestures made through the barest of means, reshaping the ways painting, sculpture, drawing and poetry are conceived. This exhibition centres hand-sized, roughly hewn assemblages constructed from everyday materials. In one work, a single length of painted wire delicately delineates a volume of space; in others jigsaw-cut timber or plywood slats both collapse and construct new spatial forms. Each work discovers its own internal measure, balancing resolve with openness and instinctiveness. As Tuttle observed, “The work rests at the unconscious level. Bringing it to the conscious level is like resisting its own will.”

These works emerged at a moment when American Minimalism was increasingly defined by large-scale, industrially fabricated objects. Tuttle instead foregrounded what might otherwise be overlooked or undervalued, adopting a distinctly intuitive approach shaped by the world around him. Throughout his career, Tuttle has responded closely to the gallery environment, creating works that convey a profound sense of physical vulnerability that challenges prevailing assumptions about spectacle, material authority and permanence. As Tuttle has stated, “People like something that lasts; I like something that vanishes.”

Although Tuttle had already exhibited in significant exhibitions across Europe, including documenta 5 in Kassel, 1972, he was first introduced to a wider American public in 1975 through a one-person exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum organised by Marcia Tucker. The radically reduced aspects of the work proved controversial, and eventually led to Tucker’s departure from the Whitney and her founding of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

The exhibition also includes Homage to Claude (1977), a sculpture first exhibited at that year’s Whitney Biennial, presented here as a single work. Tuttle explained that he was “intrigued by the tiny figures you see in Claude [Lorrain’s] huge landscapes, but the title is non-consequential – perhaps, the first piece is about space and the second is about time”. Tuttle’s work is at once singular and familiar, its understated forms carrying an insistent, unknowable order. Viewed together, his exhibitions often resemble a musical score in which scale, space and perception are brought into intimate, sensual relation.

Richard Tuttle was born in 1941 in Rahway, New Jersey. He lives and works in New York and Abiquiú, New Mexico. At the age of 23, he joined Betty Parsons Gallery as an assistant. He mounted his first exhibition there the following year, in 1965. His work was soon included in exhibitions, among them When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern (1969), Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1969); and documenta 5, Kassel (1972). A travelling retrospective, The Art of Richard Tuttle, was organised by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and mounted at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Des Moines Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2014, Tuttle was commissioned to create a new installation for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, which coincided with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Tuttle’s solo exhibition ‘Half-Light’ opened at Dia Beacon in July 2026 and is on long-term view. Tuttle’s work is held in collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Serralves Museum, Porto; Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; S.M.A.K. – Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Whitney Museum of American Art; Tate, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.