Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce “Reflection; In the Pool,” an exhibition of new works by Richard Tuttle, on view in our Terrazzo Gallery.

Included in the exhibition are twelve works, made of acrylic, graphite, cloth, linen, and thread on spun plastic, which are adhered to the wall.  Below each work, its complement is painted directly on the wall in black gesso, a kind of opaque echo to the form above.  As usual, finding the wealth in limited means, Tuttle has achieved a poetics of loss and transcendence.

A leading figure in the Post-minimalist generation of artists, Tuttle has for many years devised objects whose status is not quite sculpture or drawing or painting but some combination of the three, and whose humor, tenderness and ambition has been a revelation given their small-scale and everyday materials.  These new works with their simultaneous elements of transparency and opacity demonstrate the artist’s ongoing interest in materiality and space, texture and physicality.  According to Michael Kimmelman, “the beauty of Mr. Tuttle's art is ultimately in its concentration on materials for their own sake, and the space they occupy.”  This assertion certainly holds true for this new series for the result of the installation in the small gallery is a concentrated gathering of color and form, the black paint below each work a small and striking surprise.

Since his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1965, Tuttle has had numerous solo exhibitions and his work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad.  His work is currently the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last summer.  The exhibition is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through 5 February 2006.  It continues its tour through June 2007 at the Des Moines Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.