Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce Memory Comes from Dark Extension, an exhibition of new work by Richard Tuttle, the artist’s fifth solo show at Sperone Westwater.  The exhibition is concurrent with the final venue of the artist’s retrospective, The Art of Richard Tuttle, which has toured the United States since July 2005, and opened at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on 22 April 2007.

This is the artist’s first exhibition in which an object has been created to exist independently from the normal measure of time. When describing this new and different body of work, the artist writes:

It is my first exhibition using sculptural space in concrete relationships between material and illusion to explore time. Each work has within itself a new definition of matter constructed neither from originary nor non-originary time, but from a pre-codified version of its time – a ticking clock inside denotes temporality in non-comparable actions.

Included in the show are small relief sculptures made of various materials such as paper, plastic, wood, wire, hot glue, foil, paint, and found elements.  Each construction is affixed to the wall with a hand-hammered metal brace that projects the work into the viewer’s space. From the subtle shadows cast onto the wall to the slightest fold of paper, each object is rich with detail, and each detail is highly considered by the artist.  In order to experience the work in full you are compelled to look at it from all angles and to consider it from all perspectives.  For example, the contrast of natural and artificial lighting reminds the viewer of the boundary that exists between the artificial and natural world – between the organic and the hand-made.  The resulting experience between the work and its viewer is inviting, intimate, and ultimately spiritual.

Born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, Richard Tuttle is a leading American artist of the Post-Minimalist generation. Since the mid-1960s, Tuttle has adopted a direct and improvisational process of making art using nontraditional materials. Forty years after his first solo show, Tuttle’s art continues to question concepts of composition and frame, to explore the balance between line and volume, and to merge the mystical with the material.

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.  Most recently, a major retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has been installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.