RICHARD TUTTLE

Running from March 17 to April 29 at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, the exhibition will debut a body of work made by the artist in his New Mexico studio over the past year, incorporating elements of drawing, painting, and sculpture into exuberant investigations of the complex relationship between language and abstraction.

In this new body of work, Tuttle sculpts sheets of foam board into delicate painterly surfaces, transforming the mundane material of expanded polystyrene into mirage-like abstractions. The artist begins with a drawing on an 18- by-24-inch sheet of paper, deriving the forms of each work from shapes, gestures, and written words. These word drawings are starting points for the three-dimensional forms carved in foam, which are hung on the wall directly over the original drawings, obscuring their graphic content. The hidden calligraphy of the drawing is ultimately registered in the shape of the sculptural form, which Tuttle adorns with lyrical passages of lush, often monochromatic color.

The resulting works produce an effervescent and almost palliative effect, marrying the lightness of material and form with the pleasures of language and words. Tuttle likens the process of deliberately obscuring the textual element to ancient Mayan cylinder pots, in which original incised drawings were covered up with gesso and painted. The artist has referred to this process as a “methodology” through which he investigates “the nexus where the verbal and visual worlds meet.”

18x24 marks Richard Tuttle’s thirteenth solo exhibition with Pace since 2007. Intimate and idiosyncratic, Tuttle’s works are widely celebrated for their uncanny and singular capacity to summon poetry from humble, everyday materials and forms. Embracing a developmental approach that grows in range and inquiry with each new body of work, the artist is happiest in a quandary, when the work is neither painting nor sculpture but a complete amalgam of mediums. His work is always marked by unconventional uses of beauty as a radical means for effecting life itself. Over six decades, Tuttle has considered the myriad ways in which light, scale, color, and systems of meaning flow from his art into the world.