LONDON.- Pace London presents The Critical Edge, an exhibition of recent works in fabric by Richard Tuttle, on view from 13 April to 13 May 2017 at 6 Burlington Gardens. First presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2016, The Critical Edge follows two other major exhibitions of Tuttle’s work. In 2014, The Whitechapel Gallery surveyed the artist’s career from the 1960s to today and Tate Modern commissioned Tuttle’s largest textile sculpture to date for its iconic Turbine Hall.

A collector of textiles from around the world, Tuttle has focused and expanded his knowledge beyond his collection to understanding the intrinsic qualities of the material. The Critical Edge features a series of seven recent works assembled from layers of vibrant fabric purchased in New York and Maine. Sewn by hand and with a sewing machine, the combined cloths incorporate wood and nails. The delicate works continue Tuttle’s exploration of materiality, space, and three-dimensionality. “I’ve been very interested in how space, defined as two-dimensional (a plane, like a painting), can move into form, three dimensions,” Richard Tuttle states in the catalogue for 26, an exhibition presented at Pace New York in 2016 that spanned fifty years of the artist’s career.

Together with geometric abstraction, the embroidery of each fabric piece blurs the line between background and structure while the subtle falling of the cloth seems to breathe life into the works, hereby stimulating the senses and evoking ideas of sensuality. Without specific reference points, Tuttle’s seductive investigations of line, volume, colour and form are imbued with a sense of spirituality and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity. As reflected in the title of the exhibition, the works’ ambition is to transcend boundaries and invite viewers to contemplation.

The exhibition at Pace coincides with Richard Tuttle: My Birthday Puzzle, presented at Modern Art from 29 March to 13 May 2017.

Since the mid-1960s, Richard Tuttle (b. 1941, Rahway, New Jersey) has created an extraordinarily varied body of work that eludes historical or stylistic categorization, existing in the space between painting, sculpture, poetry, assemblage and drawing. He draws beauty out of humble materials, reflecting the fragility of the world in his poetic works.

Tuttle has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions including his 1975 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, curated by Marcia Tucker, and a 2005 retrospective organized by Madeline Grynsztejn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that toured the United States. In 2014, he exhibited in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall; simultaneously, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 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) that 2 remains on view through May 7 at the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art. Tuttle was included in the five-artist exhibition Drawing Redefined, curated by Jennifer Gross, at the deCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2015–16). His work is held in more than fifty public collections worldwide, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; 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. This is his sixth exhibition at Pace.