Richard Tuttle  (American, 1941) 

Richard Tuttle (American, b.1941) is an Post-Minimalist artist best known for creating delicate, small sculptures and installation works that he often describes as drawings. After studying at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, from 1959 to 1963, Tuttle moved to New York City to continue his studies at the Cooper Union, and work as an assistant at the Betty Parsons Gallery. His close friendship with the painter Agnes Martin (American/Canadian, 1912–2004) strongly influenced Tuttle’s work; both artists share an emphasis on subtlety, small scale, and line. Tuttle’s installations challenge the monumental scale and heavy materials used by Minimalist artists. Paper Octagonals (1970), a series of 12 shapes cut from white paper, almost disappear into the gallery’s wall. His series of 48 wire pieces bridge the gap between drawing and sculpture by extending a line drawn on a wall into a wire that casts its shadow, creating a work in three dimensions. Tuttle’s work increased in scale starting in the late 1980s, as seen in his Replace the Abstract Picture Plane IV, a grid of 40 pieces of plywood painted in bright colors. His work can be found in many museum collections, such as the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. He has held a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, and his work has been exhibited at museums around the world, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Kunsthaus Zug in Switzerland, and the Museu Serralvesin in Portugal. He is represented by the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York.