“The real print communicates through art what words cannot communicate;
all the information is visible.”
– Richard Tuttle, 2013
As the first comprehensive overview of Richard Tuttle’s prints, this exhibition reveals the artist’s profound interest in the communicative and collaborative nature of this art form. Since the 1960s, Richard Tuttle has created poetic, often ephemeral, works that dissolve the boundaries of sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation art. Printmaking, for Tuttle, provided a space of reflection “in-between” those other media. Since the 1970s, he has collaborated with renowned printers and publishers across the country, producing prints that explore and redefine the basic tenets and conceptual underpinnings of printmaking itself.
This exhibition follows Tuttle’s search for “the real print,” a print that takes full advantage of its ability to store information about processes of conception, making, and circulation. The early work proposes printmaking as a prime venue for artistic discoveries, while the prints of the 1990s and 2000s investigate printing as a form of transfer and overlay. More recent works question the basic elements of printmaking paper, matrix, ink, and pressure and expand into non-traditional materials. “I really love printmaking,” Richard Tuttle said recently, “but I want to take printmaking to places it’s never been before. The hard thing when you move into new territory is to have a hundred percent confidence that it is a print.”
Richard Tuttle divides his time between New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.
Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective is curated by Christina von Rotenhan in collaboration with Joachim Homann.
The exhibition has been made possible through important funding from the Devonwood Foundation, Eric ’85 and Svetlana Silverman, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Coco Kim and Richard Schetman P’13, halley k. harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld, Thomas A. McKinley ’06, an anonymous donor, Agnes Gund, and the membership of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
The publication has been generously supported by Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zurich; C. G. Boerner LLC, New York/Dusseldorf; Crown Point Press, San Francisco, CA; Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los Angeles, CA; Pace Gallery, New York; Universal Limited Art Editions, Bay Shore, NY; as well as by private collectors and supporters, in particular Barbara Egli and Ursula Hodel.