Richard Tuttle: Calder/Tuttle:Tentative

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Calder/Tuttle:Tentative, an exhibition featuring work by Richard Tuttle inspired by the seminal American artist, Alexander Calder, on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. from January 21 through February 25, 2023. Concurrently, Pace Gallery, in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, will present an exhibition of Calder works from 1939 selected and installed by Tuttle. On the occasion of Calder/Tuttle:Tentative, Pace Publishing and David Kordansky Gallery will produce a catalogue featuring new texts and poems by Tuttle and a poem by Alexander S. C. Rower, President of the Calder Foundation. An opening reception will be held at both galleries on Saturday, January 21 from 4 to 6:30 PM. 

Calder/Tuttle:Tentative comprises several parts. At David Kordansky Gallery, Tuttle presents a series of wall-based sculptures entitled Black Light and a group of works entitled Calder Corrected. Informed by an ongoing engagement with Calder’s work, aesthetic philosophy, and observational temperament, both series find Tuttle exploring a range of phenomena that are among the fundamental features of visual art: the visual and physical experience of color, the perception of geometry and mass, and the associative communications between abstract and natural forms. The works are not so much meditations on Calder as they are responses to—and from—the contexts in which Calder’s project emerged. In this sense, Tuttle employs his own artistic vocabulary to refresh the contemporary take on Calder’s, shedding clarifying light not only on the abiding presence of modernist abstraction in art today, but on timeless facets of art’s presence in human lives.

This approach also guides Tuttle’s curatorial process at Pace, where he has installed works by Calder in an attempt to foreground the intentions with and conditions under which they were made. While Tuttle has taken formal and historical considerations into account—focusing, for instance, on works made on the brink of World War II and reflecting on aesthetic and philosophical crosscurrents in Europe and the United States—he also creates space for foundational concepts of verticality, horizontality, light, and shadow to appear with bracing clarity. There are cases in which this process disrupts long-held ideas about why Calder’s work has made such an impact on viewers, and especially other artists, over the decades.

In the Black Light works, Tuttle transposes these concerns into multivalent constructions that reveal craft and concept to be inseparable, if distinct, modes of understanding how art connects to its viewers and the world. The exhibition’s title serves as a waypost: if every aesthetic proposition or material experiment puts into motion a cascading series of effects and counter-effects, the experience of an artwork is always a tentative affair. Tuttle’s objects address this condition by posing questions about how and where color appears, and reveling in its propensity for simultaneously containing, occupying, and portraying space. The Black Light works constitute a continuation of Tuttle’s reflections on the possibilities inherent in beams and beam-like forms, which found recent expression in a series of large- and small-scale sculptures the artist produced in 2022. However, they also provide a forum in which the artist can directly address the choreography of visible and invisible elements which provides a through-line in Calder’s project. In both cases, they find Tuttle reframing concerns, particularly about art’s paradoxical relationship to dematerialization, which have preoccupied him for decades. Many of the works’ compositional details, including the pencil-drawn letters, numbers, and arrows that guided their making, as well as their varied brushwork, highlight the impossibility of separating surfaces from interiors. These two-dimensional elements carry palpable weight, leaving room for the planar paper elements that define their silhouettes to function as a kind of three-dimensional drawing.

The Calder Corrected drawings, meanwhile, are also sites where three-dimensional effects occur in what are ordinarily considered two-dimensional places. The vertical line that bisects each work, and that results when Tuttle removes facing pages from a sketchbook, is both a distinct physical presence and a felt void where lines, shapes, and colors seem to momentarily hide from view. In their gaps, the drawings harbor possibilities, prompts for the imagination to invent alternate readings even as it concedes the limitations of the physical world. Here too, Tuttle brings a variety of materials together, showing how ideas translate into facts—and vice versa—and how colors and shapes adhere to—and resist—the intentions according to which they are manipulated. For all of these reasons, and like the curatorial orientation Tuttle brings to rethinking Calder’s legacy more broadly, the works on view in this exhibition place emphasis on the processes by which artistic potentials become actualized. In so doing, they offer precise, and therefore tentative, representations of phenomena like gravity, language, emotion, and change that are as pervasive as they are abstract.