Richard Tuttle
Calder/Tuttle:Tentative
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
January 21 – February 25, 2023
David Kordansky Gallery presents Calder/Tuttle:Tentative, an exhibition featuring work by RICHARD TUTTLE inspired by the seminal American artist, Alexander Calder. Concurrently, Pace Gallery, in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, presents an exhibition of Alexander Calder works from 1939 selected and installed by Richard Tuttle.
Calder/Tuttle:Tentative comprises several parts. At David Kordansky Gallery, Richard Tuttle presents a series of wall-based sculptures entitled Black Light and a group of works entitled Calder Corrected. Informed by an ongoing engagement with Calder’s work, aesthetic philosophy, and observational temperament, both series find Tuttle exploring a range of phenomena that are among the fundamental features of visual art: the visual and physical experience of color, the perception of geometry and mass, and the associative communications between abstract and natural forms. The works are not so much meditations on Calder as they are responses to—and from—the contexts in which Calder’s project emerged. In this sense, Richard Tuttle employs his own artistic vocabulary to refresh the contemporary take on Calder’s, shedding clarifying light not only on the abiding presence of modernist abstraction in art today, but on timeless facets of art’s presence in human lives.
This approach also guides Richard Tuttle’s curatorial process at Pace, where he has installed works by Calder in an attempt to foreground the intentions with and conditions under which they were made. While Tuttle has taken formal and historical considerations into account—focusing, for instance, on works made on the brink of World War II and reflecting on aesthetic and philosophical crosscurrents in Europe and the United States—he also creates space for foundational concepts of verticality, horizontality, light, and shadow to appear with bracing clarity. There are cases in which this process disrupts long-held ideas about why Calder’s work has made such an impact on viewers, and especially other artists, over the decades.
In the Black Light works, Richard Tuttle transposes these concerns into multivalent constructions that reveal craft and concept to be inseparable, if distinct, modes of understanding how art connects to its viewers and the world. The exhibition’s title serves as a waypost: if every aesthetic proposition or material experiment puts into motion a cascading series of effects and counter-effects, the experience of an artwork is always a tentative affair. Richard Tuttle’s objects address this condition by posing questions about how and where color appears, and reveling in its propensity for simultaneously containing, occupying, and portraying space. The Black Light works constitute a continuation of Tuttle’s reflections on the possibilities inherent in beams and beam-like forms, which found recent expression in a series of large- and small-scale sculptures the artist produced in 2022. However, they also provide a forum in which the artist can directly address the choreography of visible and invisible elements which provides a through-line in Calder’s project. In both cases, they find Richard Tuttle reframing concerns, particularly about art’s paradoxical relationship to dematerialization, which have preoccupied him for decades. Many of the works’ compositional details, including the pencil-drawn letters, numbers, and arrows that guided their making, as well as their varied brushwork, highlight the impossibility of separating surfaces from interiors. These two-dimensional elements carry palpable weight, leaving room for the planar paper elements that define their silhouettes to function as a kind of three-dimensional drawing.
The Calder Corrected drawings, meanwhile, are also sites where three-dimensional effects occur in what are ordinarily considered two-dimensional places. The vertical line that bisects each work, and that results when Tuttle removes facing pages from a sketchbook, is both a distinct physical presence and a felt void where lines, shapes, and colors seem to momentarily hide from view. In their gaps, the drawings harbor possibilities, prompts for the imagination to invent alternate readings even as it concedes the limitations of the physical world. Here too, Tuttle brings a variety of materials together, showing how ideas translate into facts—and vice versa—and how colors and shapes adhere to—and resist—the intentions according to which they are manipulated. For all of these reasons, and like the curatorial orientation Tuttle brings to rethinking Calder’s legacy more broadly, the works on view in this exhibition place emphasis on the processes by which artistic potentials become actualized. In so doing, they offer precise, and therefore tentative, representations of phenomena like gravity, language, emotion, and change that are as pervasive as they are abstract.
In 2022, Bard Graduate Center presented What Is the Object?, an exhibition co-curated by Richard Tuttle and Peter N. Miller from Tuttle’s collection of objects, which was presented alongside a series of never-before-exhibited artworks by the artist. Since the 1970s, Tuttle has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums throughout the world, including M WOODS, Beijing (2019); Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2018); Kunstmuseum aan Zee, Ostend, Belgium (2017); Museo de Arte de Lima (2016); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016); and Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern, London (2014). In 2005–2007, a retrospective exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art traveled to five additional institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His work is included in over sixty permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Richard Tuttle lives and works in New York and Abiquiú, New Mexico.
DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA 90019
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