Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle’s first solo exhibition, at the prestigious Betty Parsons Gallery in 1965, consisted of painted constructions such as Drift III, a conjoined pair of plywood forms whose wobbly contours attest to the inexact hand-drawn lines of their paper templates. The work hovers between image and object, organic and geometric, and seems to be adrift on the wall, the pale green and mauve units weightlessly lingering like grace notes. Although Tuttle usually avoids identifying the sources for his work, he has explained that the Drift series reminds him of the colored cloud formations he observed while briefly serving in the United States Air Force. The title evokes not the clouds themselves but their wandering movements as they respond to natural forces.

Tuttle’s ten-year survey exhibition at the Whitney in 1975 garnered a host of negative reviews from the conservative art establishment, whose vituperation focused on the works’ minuteness and offhanded presentation; one critic complained that after seeing the exhibition he was compelled to examine the hairline cracks in the gallery wall. But Tuttle’s art is driven by such dramas as hairline cracks, creases in fabric, or a wavering graphite trace precisely because they sensitize the viewer’s eye.

Since then Tuttle has gained a reputation as an artist of poetry and quietude, even of disappearance, because his work is slight in scale if not always small in size, and made from humble, ephemeral materials such as rope, cardboard, twigs, and florist’s wire. The artist has said that he considers the installation of delicate objects like Drift III, which often lie in the middle of the gallery floor or hang awkwardly high or low on the wall, to be “the other half of the work.”