BEACON, NY.- Dia Art Foundation opened Richard Tuttle: Half-Light at Dia Beacon. Bringing Richard Tuttle’s work to Dia’s galleries for the first time, this exhibition features two recent series by the artist—one of which recently entered Dia’s permanent collection, the other realized onsite in response to it. Presenting distinct methods of making and installation, these series extend Tuttle’s lifelong investigation into systems of meaning andreality. Richard Tuttle: Half-Light opened July 31, 2026, and will be on long-term view.
“Richard Tuttle is deeply engaged with light, scale, seriality, and space—areas of exploration that are paramount to Dia’s legacy. His work is at once playful and vibrant yet formally and conceptually rigorous, with careful chromatic and spatial consideration given to each element,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.
For more than five decades, Richard Tuttle has been loosening the boundaries between painting, poetry, and sculpture to realize an eccentric body of materially light, conceptually rich work. His expansive practice resists conventional categories as he finds profound expressive potential in modest materials, foregrounding a handmade quality and a deep spatial awareness.
Conceived in close dialogue with the artist, this exhibition presents two recent series: the planar 18 × 24 (2022–23) and the multifarious Good Idea (2025–26), which the artist realized in his New Mexico and Maine residences, respectively. The 18 × 24 series continues Tuttle’s extensive exploration of the relationship between the verbal and the visual, each acrylic-painted Styrofoam work originating from a word drawing on an 18-by-24-inch sheet of paper. Ranging from entirely abstract forms to glyph-like shapes reminiscent of graphic notations, the works hang directly over their corresponding word drawings, at once riddled by and overriding their linguistic source. Conversely, the Good Idea series considers the state of being in the world through relationships among materials, objects, and space.Assembled from reclaimed everyday materials, intentionally or incidentally marked with pencil, crayons, or spray paint, each work hangs from a swath of raw canvas, suggesting a shared fabric that both physically and conceptually connects the series. Scattered across the walls and floor, the works articulate shifting relationships among their constituent parts, one another, and the architecture that supports them.
“Tuttle’s unwavering pursuit of art that participates in the world under the same conditions as other physical things is reflected in the exhibition’s title, Half-Light, which the artist once defined as both an atmospheric effect and a streaming of time,” said Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Dia curator. “This concept and its attending affect are explored across these profoundly inventive bodies of work, contrapuntally installed at Dia Beacon.”
Richard Tuttle: Half-Light is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.
Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941. A prominent figure associated with the emergence of Post minimalism in the United States, Tuttle works within an expanded field of drawing to conflate its methods with the volumetric idioms of sculpture, painting, and installation. His practice also includes bookmaking and poetry, often reflected in his artworks’ lyrical titles as well as in the conceptual exchange between his objects and publications. His work has been exhibited at Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1972, 1977, and 1982); the Venice Biennale (1976, 1997, and 2001); and the Whitney Biennial, New York (1977, 1987, and 2000). In 2005, a retrospective of his work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, touring to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005–06), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007), among other American institutions. Recent presentations include Richard Tuttle: San, Shi, Go, Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyobashi, Tokyo (2025); Richard Tuttle: Nothing, Galerie Greta Meert (2026); and Almost Sky: Jun Aoki + Richard Tuttle, Tokyo Opera City Gallery (2026). Tuttle lives in Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.
