Richard Tuttle “What’s the Wind”
May 7 – July 22, 2011

NEW YORK, April 21, 2011—The Pace Gallery presents Richard Tuttle “What’s the Wind,” at 510 West 25th Street from May 7 through July 22, 2011. The opening is on Friday, May 6 from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will feature six recent free-standing sculptures measuring more than seven feet tall and seven feet wide. Each sculpture is based on an outer “space frame” and an inner assemblage of elements made from various materials. The intensely self-referential works are a synthesis of five decades of Tuttle’s work.

These new sculptures, called “Systems,” conceive of sculpture as spatial interpenetration, rather than concrete, three-dimensional form. They are permeable, as you are invited in to see the fragments and out to see the whole. “Systems” may be traced from Tuttle’s palm-size, paper cubes of 1964 (examples can be found in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Moderna Museet, Stockholm). They can also be traced to the large, outdoor sculpture Tuttle made at Artpark, Lewiston, NY, in 1974. Updated in 2010, these sculptures, or now, “pumps,” as the artist calls them, serve and address the environmental requirements in that area. A special edition of the newspaper, “Artpark Sun,” published by the University of Buffalo, celebrating those sculptures, will be available at the gallery during the show.

What’s the Wind is Richard Tuttle’s second solo exhibition at The Pace Gallery since joining in 2007. Nearly three hundred solo exhibitions devoted to the artist’s work have been mounted since 1965, in addition to his multiple inclusions in the prestigious Venice Biennale (1976, 1997, 2001) as well as biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977, 1987, 2000) and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1969). Richard Tuttle: Triumphs was on view at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane from November, 2010 through April, 2011. Other major recent exhibitions include Richard Tuttle: The Use of Time at the Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland (2008), which reunited Tuttle’s seminal four works from the 1990s, Replace the Abstract Picture Plane I – IV, for the first time in nearly a decade and juxtaposed them with newly executed works, connecting the interior and exterior spaces of the museum. A major retrospective, The Art of Richard Tuttle, was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, and travelled to the Whitney Museum; Des Moines Art Center; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through 2007.

Richard Tuttle’s work can be found in major public collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Sprengel Museum Hanover, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Whitney Museum, among many others.

Richard Tuttle lives and works in Abiquiu, New Mexico and New York City.

For more information about Richard Tuttle: What’s the Wind, please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email [email protected]; for reproduction requests, email [email protected].