Richard Tuttle

As evinced by their vivid colors, intimate scale, and sustained experimentation with line, the works in Richard Tuttle: basis, 70s Drawings are akin in style to the artist’s most renowned pieces. Like all of Tuttle’s oeuvre, they seek to challenge our preconceived notions on the nature of art and how we experience it. “In some sense, an artist is…a true philosopher,” Tuttle explains. “You can go to the limit of any and all disciplines.” His two sets of drawings—forty-one from the early ‘70s and fifty-three from the late ‘70s—articulate a visual vocabulary that would form the basis of much of his later work of the ‘80s, including the  series “Loose Leaf Notebook Drawings,” “India Work,” and “Hong Kong Set.” They are part of Tuttle’s then-controversial reinvention of the medium: drawing as a performative act occurring within the gallery space and through the use of materials deemed extraneous to the arts.

Created soon after the pinnacle of Minimalism, which disrupted the strict distinction between painting and sculpture, the works in this exhibition similarly break down the boundaries between drawing and sculpture. The series achieves this by combining bright watercolors with collage and assemblage, producing a pronounced tactile quality. The artist’s carefully designed shadowbox frames, at first in ash wood and subsequently overlaid in gold leaf, extend this breakdown of boundaries to the work’s presentation and further blur the line separating the work of art from the realm of everyday objects.