Richard Tuttle: 26

Pace Gallery presents 26, an exhibition of works by Richard Tuttle spanning fifty years of the artist’s career. To accompany the exhibition, a catalogue will be published with a conversation between the artist and Bill Brown, the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture at the University of Chicago.

The exhibition will include works from Tuttle’s twenty-six solo gallery shows in New York: Betty Parsons Gallery (1965, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1982); BlumHelman Gallery (1983, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990); Mary Boone Gallery (1992, 1993, 1995); Sperone Westwater (1996, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007); and Pace Gallery (2009, 2011, 2012, 2014).

Extending from Tuttle’s constructed paintings shown in 1965 at Betty Parsons Gallery to his Looking for the Map works from Pace’s 2014 exhibition, 26 will trace the artist’s work brought together for the first time. Using a historic framework as a way of looking forward, the show will include works such as M – Violet – M (1965), a plywood relief with a painted monochromatic surface, and First Paper Octagonal (1970), an irregularly shaped octagon cut from white paper and affixed directly to the wall.

26 will include three of Tuttle’s galvanized tin “letters”—early examples of the artist’s commitment to language—as well as a wire piece, a notebook drawing, a textile work, a selection of wall-bound assemblages, and other works that reveal the artist’s enduring focus of what he has referred to as “making something which looks like itself.”

The exhibition at Pace coincides with Richard Tuttle: Critical Edge, a presentation of new works in fabric at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which is on view from April 2 to June 26, 2016.