PRESS RELEASE
Richard Tuttle
16 September – 28 October 2005
Opening reception: Friday, 16 September, 6 to 8 pm
Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by artist Richard Tuttle. Exhibiting at the gallery for the second time, Tuttle’s intelligent, abstract, unassuming yet aggressive vision has raised the bar on contemporary art for over 40 years.
During the winter of 2004 Tuttle unveiled a new body of work in the Drawing Center exhibition A Room for 3 People. Comprised of six ‘villages,’ groupings of a sculpture and two sets of drawings, the show investigated the relationship between the artist, collector and art historian. The essence of the Drawing Center exhibition, and an ongoing topic presented by Tuttle’s work for many years, is that the moment artwork is installed in a public setting it ceases to belong only to the artist; it now belongs to art history and there will be a public determination of its success or failure.
The structural dynamic of the work exhibited at Anthony Meier Fine Arts is an extension of the ‘village’ line. Materials as varied and unorthodox as sand, yarn, nails, faux fur and tinsel are attached to balsa wood, museum board or paper backs in a group of work Tuttle has titled Circles.
Four of the Circles are individual pieces while two others are comprised of an assemblage of two and three-dimensional components. How the works sit on the wall, the space taken up by their tangible footprints in relation to the visual—and sometimes emotional space—they take up, is an interesting and arresting conversation.
Also included in the exhibition are six drawings made during the installation of Tuttle’s first museum retrospective, The Art of Richard Tuttle, currently on view at the SFMOMA through October 16th. The retrospective will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Des Moines Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.