Richard Tuttle: 18 x 24

Modern Art is pleased to announce the second of two consecutive exhibitions by Richard Tuttle, together forming a large-scale solo presentation of both new and historical work, marking Tuttle’s sixth showing with Modern Art.

Following the presentation of Tuttle’s historical installation, Village V, Modern Art’s second exhibition at its Bury Street gallery contains a group of new wall-based works made by Tuttle in his New Mexico studio over the past year. Each beginning as a word drawing on a piece of 18 x 24 inch paper, these drawings are then translated into sculptural and painterly forms. Some remain almost entirely as abstract while others edge closer to glyphs-like forms, invoking the graphics of symbols, letters or images. Made from polystyrene foam board and painted with a light and lyrical brush, these works are then hung directly over the original word drawings, leaving their antecedent linguistic or graphic content concealed. Like much of Tuttle’s oeuvre, 18 x 24 originates from a strict methodological process that is enlivened through Tuttle’s intuition and lightness of touch; the unconscious impulses permitted entry into a finely tuned system. Tuttle describes these works, and the methodology behind them, as continuing a larger project of examining the nexus between verbal and visual worlds. Grouped together, with their idiosyncratic shapes and playful colours - reminiscent of Tuttle’s early works – 18 x 24 creates a space of reverie, where the pleasure of abstract colour, texture and shape interact with the symbolic order of language. As such, hung in a single line across the walls of the space, these new works invite a kind of close, linear looking from left to right (or right to left), while moving around the gallery, as though to evoke the eye’s movements across the lines of a page.