Richard Tuttle, ‘I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language’ will be the largest survey of work ever held in the UK, by the renowned US artist Richard Tuttle (b.1941). Comprising an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery plus a large-scale sculpture in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and a new publication. Richard Tuttle came to prominence in the 1960s, combining sculpture, painting, poetry and drawing. He has become revered for his delicate and playful approach, often using such humble, everyday materials as cloth, paper, rope and plywood. For this project, Tuttle has taken as his starting point one of the unsung heroes of everyday life: textile.
Textile is commonly associated with craft and fashion, yet woven canvas lies behind many of the world’s most acclaimed works of art and textiles are of increasing interest to artists today. I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language investigates the importance of this material throughout history, across Tuttle’s remarkable body of work and into the latest developments in his practice. The exhibition will survey Tuttle’s career from the 1960s to today and will bring together a group of bespoke fabrics, each of which combines natural and man-made fibres to create different textures in bright colours. These will be suspended from the ceiling as a sculptural form, contrasting with the solid industrial architecture of the Turbine Hall, to create an immense volume of colour and fluidity.
Richard Tuttle is one of the most significant artists working today. Since the mid-1960s, he has created an extraordinarily varied body of work that eludes historical or stylistic categorization. Tuttle’s work exists 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. Without a specific reference point, his investigations of line, volume, colour, texture, shape, and form are imbued with a sense of spirituality and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity. Language, spatial relationship, and scale are also central concerns for the artist, who maintains an acute awareness for the viewer’s aesthetic experience. Tuttle was the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute from September 2012–June 2013. The artist lives and works in Mount Desert, Maine; Abiquiu, New Mexico and New York City. Tuttle has been showing internationally, recent solo exhibitions include: I Don’t Know, OR The Weave of Textile Language, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (forthcoming), I Don’t Know, OR The Weave of Textile Language, Whitechapel Gallery, London (forthcoming), Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, USA, 2014 Richard Tuttle: 1, 2, 3, Galerie Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2014 Looking for the Map, Pace Gallery, New York, NY, USA, 2014, Marian Goodman, Paris, France, 2013, The Place in the Window, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto, Japan, 2013, Richard Tuttle: Slide, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, 2012, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, 2012, Hello The Roses, with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kunstverein Munich, Germany, 2012, Richard Tuttle: Systems VIII–XII, Pace Gallery, New York, USA, 2012, Richard Tuttle: Paper, Annemarie Verna Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland, 2012.
Photo: Installation shot John Bowyer Via Twitter
Richard Tuttle 14 October to 14 December 2014, the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern Turbine Hall Comission from 14 October 2014 to 6 April 2015