Exhibition of New Works by Richard Tuttle On View at The Met

Exhibition Dates: April 2–June 26, 2016
Exhibition Location: Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, north and south mezzanine, Galleries 914 and 916

One of the most significant artists working today, Richard Tuttle first came to prominence in the heady years of the 1960s, when he gained critical recognition for a body of work that used humble, mundane materials such as textile, paper, wire, and rope—materials that have remained the cornerstone of his practice. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the installation Richard Tuttle: The Critical Edge, on view April 2 through June 26, 2016, features a series of six new works made from fabric purchased in New York and Maine, along with 10 paintings. Together they elaborate Tuttle’s interest in abstraction, texture, and materiality, as well as his long-standing use of cloth as a medium.

The exhibition is made possible by The Modern Circle.

An astute collector of textiles, Tuttle builds his assemblages from layers of fabric that are cut and sewn by hand, sometimes with the aid of a sewing machine. From these fragments he fashions idiosyncratic shapes and eccentric compositions, many endowed with a clumsy yet evocative three-dimensionality. The works result from a kind of collaboration between the artist and the textiles he selects—the fabric, for instance, provides the objects with both their color and their form. In keeping with his playful insistence on refusing to be categorized, Tuttle uses elements of drawing, painting, weaving, and sculpture to create these hybrid objects. Accordingly, both embroidery and the cloth’s overlapping edges function as drawn lines. The pliable pieces of draped fabric, similarly, are responsive to the surrounding environment: shifts in the air cause them to rise and fall in a manner suggestive of breathing. Because the pieces vary in their degree of opacity and transparency, they catch and release light in different ways. For these reasons, Tuttle’s works are highly sensual objects that activate our senses of sight and touch. Furthermore, by alluding to philosophical inquiry, the objects’ shared title, The Critical Edge, suggests that the works reach beyond art to become meditations on the nature of perception and understanding.

About the Artist

Richard Tuttle (born 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions including his 1975 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and a 2005 retrospective organized at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2014, he exhibited in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall; simultaneously, London’s Whitechapel Gallery presented I Don’t Know. Or The Weave of Textile Language, a survey of his textile works that traveled to the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Other recent exhibitions include Wire Pieces at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2015), and a retrospective of his prints organized by Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine (2014). Tuttle was included in the five-artist exhibition Drawing Redefined at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2015–16).

His work is held in more than 50 public collections worldwide, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Richard Tuttle lives and works in Mount Desert, Maine; Abiquiu, New Mexico; and New York.

Richard Tuttle: The Critical Edge is organized by Kelly Baum, Curator of Postwar and Contemporary Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The exhibition is featured on the Museum’s website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using #RichardTuttle.