Richard Tuttle: I Dont know or The Weave of Textile Language, Whitechapel Gallery

In October London’s Whitechapel Gallery will play host to the largest gathering of works by celebrated artist Richard Tuttle ever seen in the UK. Incorporating pieces from across his career, starting in the 1960’s continuing to the present day, the exhibition will be complemented by the unveiling of a new work in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Once described as an ‘artist’s artist’, expect a resistance to definition.

The artist

Born in 1941 in New Jersey, Richard Tuttle studied at Trinity College in Connecticut before suffering a brief stint in the United States Air Force. He had been a gallery assistant at the Betty Parson Gallery in New York for only a year when he was given his own show at the tender age of twenty-four. It is a troublesome task to pigeonhole Tuttle into a single neat medium as he travels between printmaking, painting, installation art and the written word. If your arm were twisted you would be closest to the mark by defining him as a sculptor, although this in itself is a deceptively loose term. For the purpose of this upcoming collaboration between Whitechapel and Tate however, it is perhaps sensible to think of Tuttle as a textile artist. This is because the over-arching sentiment of the show is the role that textiles play not only in art, but also in everyday life. 

The exhibition

Tuttle’s works in textiles and mixed media have always been intimate, especially in the first half of his prolific career. The Whitechapel exhibition will highlight this close relationship of the artist to fibre and thread. In a lay out designed by the artist himself, the works will respond both to each other and to the Whitechapel’s celebrated exhibition spaces, rather than map the chronological development of Tuttle’s career. We are particularly looking forward to seeing Tuttle’s radical canvases, which were ripped from the stretcher to be hung directly on the wall in works such as Purple Octagonal (1967).