Stuart Shave/Modern Art announces a solo exhibition of new work by Richard Tuttle, Light & Colour. This is the American artist’s second solo show with Modern Art.

Richard Tuttle’s practice is marked by a discursive approach to materiality and gesture, prevailed with an intuitive artistic and intellectual rigour. Known for his works of subtlety, intimacy and humility, Tuttle’s is a genuinely seminal practice that has influenced generations of art making throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The evolution of Tuttle’s work embraces a radical and progressive spirit in the pursuit of problems and solutions within the languages of art. Using everyday and non-traditional art-making materials, Tuttle’s works are often not quite categorisable as drawing, painting or sculpture, but touch lightly on the fundamental basis of each. In the form and expression of his work, Tuttle devotes his attention to the fragile condition of art and the everyday, attending to the concrete and emotive potential of line, space, colour and shape.

This exhibition at Modern Art demonstrates an understanding of sculpture as a fundamentally spatial conception. The front room of the gallery is devoted to a single wall-based sculpture comprised of a series of eight small painted mahogany shapes, hung in sequence along a drawn pencil line. Titled Light and Color (2011), this new work touches on the essential character of Tuttle’s practice: an open and nuanced vocabulary of form and colour that suggests an approach to ambiguous conditions of language. The second room of the gallery places a new large sculpture at its centre: System 7, Hickory Dickory Dock (2011). This compelling new work is open, expansive and propositional, providing a freestanding structure self-inhabited with fragments of assembled and sculpted form. While Tuttle is known perhaps most widely for the nature of the small scale works such as Light and Color, his new large works emphatically restate the instinctive, eloquent deployment of humble materials, and acute sensitivity to touch and space that is characteristic of Tuttle’s work throughout five decades of practice.

Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey, USA, in 1941. He lives and works in New York City, and Abiquiu, New Mexico, USA. Tuttle completed his BA at Trinity College, Hartford, USA, in 1963. Richard Tuttle’s work has been the subject of more than two hundred solo exhibitions. He held his first solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, USA in 1965, and in 1975 was granted a ten-year survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA. Richard Tuttle’s work has been included on three occasions in the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (1976, 1997, and 2001), Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1972, 1977 and 1987), and the Whitney Biennial of American Art, New York, USA (1977, 1987, and 2000). Recent solo museum exhibitions include Richard Tuttle: Triumphs, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland (2010 – 2011); Richard Tuttle: The Use of Time, Kunsthaus Zug, Zug, Switzerland (2008); The Art of Richard Tuttle, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA, touring the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, USA, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA (2005 – 2007); Richard Tuttle: Wire Pieces, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2005); Richard Tuttle: It’s a Room for 3 People, Drawing Center, New York, USA, touring to Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2004 – 2006); Richard Tuttle: Perceived Obstacles, Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseum, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig, Germany, touring to Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Germany, and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2000 – 2001).

Since his last exhibition at Modern Art in 2009, Tuttle’s work has been included in the museum exhibitions On-Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2010 – 2011); Fifty Works for Fifty States: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA (2010); Thrice Upon A Time, Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2010); The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (2009); Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, USA (2009); and Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976, The Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2008).