Richard Tuttle Study Visit

Influential American artist Richard Tuttle combines drawing, printmaking, sculpture, painting and textiles to create work that is both delicate and playful. Using everyday materials such as cardboard, string, paper and cloth, he explores the relationship between these materials and their surface qualities. For Tuttle, the found object or the piece of wire has the potential to be beautiful and poetic.
‘ If I can free a humble material from itself, perhaps I can free myself from myself..I think my work knows it is smarter than I am, better than I am ’                                                                  Richard Tuttle 2004
Tuttle came to prominence in the 1960’s and was one of the first artists to remove the canvas from it’s stretcher and pin it to the wall, disrupting the notion of the art object and it’s boundaries. His work is subversive without being obviously shocking. At times it is deceptively simple yet there is a complexity and a deep intellectual curiosity that reveals itself slowly.
For this major exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Richard Tuttle has taken text and textiles as his starting point and created new pieces to be hung alongside earlier work that incorporates fibre and thread. Colour, line and materiality is explored in assemblages, installations and wall pieces that vary in scale from the intimate to the monumental. Tuttle is also concerned with the properties of space and proportion through a direct response to the historic architecture of the gallery.
‘ Textiles and their respective processes bring awareness to a structure that becomes more and more invisible as it transfers the physicality of the hands to the spirituality in the head ’
Richard Tuttle  2014

A study visit is planned to Richard Tuttle: I don’t know. The weave of textile language at The Whitechapel Gallery on Sunday 7 December at 11am with tutor Clare Wilson.
To book your place email enquiries@oca-uk.com
 
Image Credits
Richard Tuttle Walking on air C3  2009
Richard Tuttle Paris Piece 1 1990