Born in Rahway, New Jersey, Richard Tuttle creates minimalist geometric paintings that explore the possibilities of lines. His small-size work has sometimes been puzzling to his New York peers, many whom create large-scale works. However, in 2004, Tuttle also turned his creativity to large pieces with his installation, "Splash", his first public art project, which is a mural 90 by 150 feet with about 140,000 pieces of colroed glass and white ceramic tile.

In a "New York Times" interview, December 3, 2004, Tuttle commented on any seeming contradiction in this new work: "There have always been questions of invisibility with my work, its small size, but there's also an invisibility connected to supersize. There's a threshold with how big things can get and we can comprehend them. Invisible small or invisible large doesn't make much difference".

Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey and earned a BA Degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He then moved to New York City where he became administrator of the Betty Parsons Gallery. There in 1965, he had his first exhibition.

He has exhibited widely in Germany, and his career changed from making thick wood pieces to ones that got thinner and thinner. He also injected letters of the alphabet in works that he intended to be neither paintings nor sculpture--just unique entities without easy labels.

He later settled in New Mexico where he became a friend of Taos minimalist artist Agnes Martin, known for monochromatic grid paintings. Their friendship led to a joint exhibition at SITE Santa Fe in October, 1998, and his wire pieces became a testimony to the possibilities of the drawn line that he saw in her work.

Sources include:
Paul Gardner, 'Odd Man In', "ARTnews", April 2004
Julie Salamon, 'Artist or Guru, He Aims Deep', "New York Times", December 3, 2004
"Who's Who in American Art", 2003-2004, p. 1230

Richard Tuttle (b. 1941) Grown up in New Jersey, Richard Tuttle fist studied at the Pratt Institute of Design in Brooklyn and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1964, after further artistic training at the Trinity College Hartford in Connecticut.

After a short semester at the Cooper Union in New York, Richard Tuttle had his first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1965. His early works are deeply influenced by the works of Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, which eventually animated him to his personal poetic, post-minimalist style.

Richard Tuttle already gained recognition in Europe in 1969, when exhibiting at Harald Szeemann’s legendary exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form’. This was followed by his much admired participations at the documenta exhibitions 5, 6 and 7 in Kassel.

Today, the artist lives and works in New York, in Mount Desert, Maine and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (cko)