Richard Tuttle

As one of the most significant artists working today, Richard Tuttle has revolutionized the landscape of contemporary art. Since the mid-1960s, he has created an extraordinarily varied body of work challenging rules and notions of genre and media. Using humble materials, Tuttle highlights line, shape, color, and spatial relationship as central concerns. Throughout Tuttle's career, he has remained committed to using his poetic sensitivity to create works that exist in the present moment and allow for the audience’s individual experiences of perception and, consequently, indicate a break from a dualistic view of the world.

The series Double Corner and Colored Wood presented at Pace Gallery were both created in 2018 and 2019. They possess the lightness and subtlety distinctive of Tuttle's works, as they embody the intrinsic qualities of their materials, space, and light. In Double Corner, familiar materials such as wooden sticks, wire, and colored paper are arranged in abstract structure, intertwining on the angled walls to create an entirely new composition. These materials have gradually built up Tuttle’s own graphic lexicon throughout the past five decades. For Tuttle, conventional artistic pursuits such as narrative or representational metaphors are not of interest when selecting materials; instead, he focuses on addressing the question of how the material itself can activate its own perceptional dimension in the relationships that the artist constructed. The series Colored Wood reminds us of the Constructed Paintings that Tuttle made fifty-five years ago. In both series, he used plywood to create shapes. However, in contrast to the relief-like structure and the reference to pictogram employed in Constructed Paintings, the plain name of the new works suggests that they are humbler, franker and undefinable. By simply hanging the cut-out and sanded plywood, these pieces catch lights from the surroundings, generating an ever-changing experience between the works and the audience.

Angled walls are used as an element to connect the retrospective show held at M Woods and Tuttle’s new works at Pace. As a whole, these two presentations stand side-by-side as if they comprise a complete artwork, expressing the ideas of the artist through different angles and perspectives. As Tuttle said, in his artistic career spanning half a century, he has attempted to answer a number of questions regarding art. However, the shows in Beijing are more of a “question” for the audience to contemplate and interpret on their own.