Richard Tuttle is one of the foundational figures of American post-Minimalism, an artist whose small, modest, materially diverse works in cloth, wire, paper, wood, and pencil reshaped the boundaries of American sculpture, drawing, and painting in the late twentieth century and prompted what may be the most consequential reception controversy of any American gallery exhibition since the 1960s.
Richard Dean Tuttle (born July 12, 1941) is an American post-Minimalist artist working across sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, artist's books, installation, and furniture. Born in Rahway, New Jersey, and raised in Roselle, he studied art, philosophy, and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, completing his BA in 1963, and spent a semester at the Cooper Union and a brief period in the U.S. Air Force before joining the Betty Parsons Gallery as an assistant. Parsons gave him his first solo exhibition in 1965, a year after he began working for her.
His work explores the relationship between scale, line, material, and form at consistently small or intimate dimensions, and he refers to his sculptures as drawings regardless of medium. His 1975 Whitney Museum solo exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker, became one of the most consequential single shows of its era, provoking both Hilton Kramer's famous New York Times review and Tucker's eventual departure from the Whitney, and helping to define the broader cultural break between the institutional Minimalism of the late 1960s and the more open, materially varied post-Minimalism of the 1970s. He has received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1998) and the Aachen Art Prize (1998), and was the subject of the major 2005 SFMOMA retrospective that travelled across the United States, including a return to the Whitney. His work is held in essentially every major American collection of postwar art, and he lives and works in New York City, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.