Richard Tuttle

Open Carefully

New York City, USA: Sperone Westwater, 2000

Mixed Media object with mini exhibition book 

4 x 9 x 1 in (10 x 23 x 3 cm)

Edition of 1000 signed and numbered copies

This is edition #816 of 1000

For his third solo exhibition at Sperone Westwater, Two With Any To, Richard Tuttle presented a series of painted plywood panels of various simple colors and shapes. Open Carefully, an unusual exhibition catalogue/artists' book/artists' multiple hybrid, was published in conjunction with the show.

The work consists of a hand painted plastic container, suggestive of a clam shell, which has compartments within an oval. One holds five painted stones and the other contains a small booklet of ten thumbnail images of recent sculptures. Lastly, a fan made out of five printed paper strands. These were handed out at the exhibition and the recipient used the watercolor to paint onto the sculpture themselves.

Richard Tuttle’s multifarious oeuvre is a study in scale and line using common materials that have been inventively assembled and exhibited. Much of Tuttle’s work rethinks the potential of the line; the installation Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself (1973) featured a pencil line that detached from the wall it was drawn on and continued as string along the floor. Tuttle’s sculptures experiment with space in similarly inspired ways and are constructed using a panoply of industrial and organic materials, including shrink wrap, tape, metal, paper, and balloons.