Richard Tuttle: Making Silver

by Richard Tuttle (Artist)

Making Silver is a new book conceived by Richard Tuttle (born 1941). Featuring new texts and comprehensive installation photos from his exhibition Slide (Bergen Kunsthall, 2012), it documents the five steel sculptures that Tuttle made on site in Bergen, as well as including full-color reproductions of 121 drawings. These "notebook drawings" cover the artist's entire artistic output of a single year (2010), and were exhibited as the front page of the spiralbound notebook, which was mounted on the wall with a nail, emphasizing the notebook itself as sculptural entity. The unique concept for the book―developed by Tuttle himself, who is celebrated for his virtuosity with artist's books―includes an inserted "book within a book," pop-out details and an extensive fold-out cover.

88 pages, Paperback

Published February 24, 2015

About the author

Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line.

Tuttle studied at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and after moving to New York in 1963 he spent a semester at the Cooper Union and worked at the Betty Parsons Gallery. One year after taking a job as an assistant at Betty Parsons, she gave him his first show.

Tuttle's reputation as a master was secure in Europe from early on, though acceptance of his work in his home country was slower. His works on paper are considered seminal works in American art. Tuttle had a survey exhibition in 1975 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit was controversial and the show's curator Marcia Tucker lost her job as a result, after a scathing review by Hilton Kramer.[1] Kramer, then art critic for The New York Times wrote, referring to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's dictum "less is more", "in Mr. Tuttle's work, less is unmistakably less...One is tempted to say, art is concerned, less has never been as less than this." Tuttle's work, however, is in the collection of the Whitney today.

Tuttle is often referred to as an "artist's artist" and, as such, his work has been influential to a generation of contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith, Jim Hodges, David Hammons, Michael Oman-Reagan, Tom Friedman and Jessica Stockholder. He was a very close friend of minimalist painter Agnes Martin until her death in 2004.

In 2005, Tuttle had a major retrospective spanning his 40 year career at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in November, 2005. He is represented by Sperone Westwater in New York City and by Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf and by Annemarie Verna Galerie in Zurich. He lives and works in New York City and New Mexico. He is married to the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.

He has been the recipient of many awards for his work including the 74th American Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago Biennial Prize, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, New York, and the Aachen Art Prize, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Germany.

Richard Tuttle has recently been commissioned to build a sculpture for the Kunsthalle of the town of Zug, Switzerland.

An exhibition of his new fabric sculptures, Richard Tuttle: Walking on Air, was on view through April 25, 2009 at PaceWildenstein's 534 West 25th Street gallery. A series of his colored aquatints is on exhibit at the Dubner Moderne gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland from February 11 through March 15, 2010.

He presented a lecture in collaboration with his poet wife, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, through the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in April, 2009. he is still alive