Jan 28–Mar 5, 2005

Richard Tuttle: It’s a Room for 3 People

For this major two-part exhibition, contemporary American artist Richard Tuttle created a new body of work that expanded the traditional boundaries of drawing. In the main gallery, Tuttle arrayed five clusters of work—what he terms “villages”—consisting of both wall-mounted works and three-dimensional pieces. The exhibition highlights Tuttle’s extraordinary manipulation of a surprising variety of materials, including traditional drawing media, such as graphite, watercolor, charcoal, colored pencil, and gouache, as well as non-traditional media, such as plywood, string, cardboard, cloth, sawdust, glitter, and Styrofoam.

The second part of the exhibition in the Drawing Room (on view February 5, 2005) features a sixth "village" of two-dimensional and three-dimensional work, created in response to the five "villages" presented in the concurrent main gallery exhibition. The second part of this unique pairing of exhibitions is a more experimental opportunity for the artist to address the questions about drawing raised in the first exhibition.

Richard Tuttle: It’s A Room for 3 People is on view at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado from December 9, 2005–February 5, 2006.

Richard Tuttle

A vital force in the development of Conceptualism and post-Minimalism, Richard Tuttle is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Tuttle’s work usually relies on seemingly understated uses of common materials, such as plywood, rope, Styrofoam, fabric, and cardboard. His careful use of simple media is intended to call attention to their manipulation, display, and materiality, as well as their effects upon the viewer’s perceptual awareness. Unlike many of his Minimalist contemporaries, Tuttle is a vocal proponent of beauty and the persuasive power of aestheticism. Wire and wood, in his work, may refer to drawing and Baroque decoration, while blank paper renders invisibility as a palpable but ineffable presence.

Although much in Tuttle’s assemblages may appear haphazard, aleatory, or improvisational, his reputation is that of a master craftsman. His extensive planning, design, and carefully considered execution yields a body of work that emphasizes the importance of the details. Curious, also, is the modest scale of most of Tuttle’s artworks. Their smallness is deliberately antithetical to, and in confrontation with, the industrial monoliths of his peers, such as Judd, Serra, and di Suvero. In addition to his visual art, Tuttle writes poetry and has previously collaborated with poets such as Charles Bernstein and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

Though Tuttle’s work is now canonical, it was met with fierce criticism early in his career: the artist’s 1975 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art was received terribly by many prominent critics, most famously by Hilton Kramer of the New York Times, and curator Marcia Tucker—who went on to found the New Museum of Contemporary Art later that year—was fired from the museum, allegedly because of the controversy surrounding the show. 30 years later, Tuttle’s 2005 retrospective at the Whitney was welcomed with great enthusiasm from critics and audiences alike.

Tuttle has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and retrospectives, at venues including the Whitney Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Dallas Musuem of Art, the Drawing Center in New York, the ICA London, the Musée d’art modern de la ville de Paris, among many others. His work was also included in the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 1997; the Whitney Biennial in 1977, 1979, 1987, and 2000; and Documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), and 7 (1982).