Following “My Best,” an exhibition of an alphabet of twenty-six panels presented in 2023 in the historic space of Galerie Lelong on rue de Téhéran, Richard Tuttle returns, this time to avenue Matignon, with “Ovals,” an extensive series of watercolors.
As is always the case with Tuttle, the exhibition follows a precise and demanding program. For it is within the constraints he imposes upon himself, while working in his studios in New Mexico and Maine, that the artist’s extraordinary capacity for improvisation paradoxically draws its strength and freedom.
Here, forty-six sheets of paper of identical dimensions (with one slight exception) each bear an oval outline drawn in pencil, identical in every instance, upon which Tuttle applies his delicately nuanced, unmistakably characteristic touch. Through watercolor, he explores the oval, inscribes himself within it, escapes beyond it, and interprets it through a succession of echoes and variations. Tuttle does not seek to represent the world but to participate in it, humbly yet resolutely. Finally, as a counterpoint to his brushwork, the artist has chosen to vary the colors of the frames, weaving together black, gold, silver, brown, and gray throughout the exhibition’s arrangement.
Born in 1941, Richard Tuttle first came to prominence in the 1960s for his highly individual ability to infuse American Minimalism with a freshness and inventiveness that revitalized the content and forms of this school of restraint. His unclassifiable body of work occupies, with a lightness of touch, the deliberately blurred boundaries between painting, poetry, and sculpture. The year 2026 has already been marked by two major exhibitions for the artist: “Half Light” at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York, and “Almost Sky,” created with architect Jun Aoki, at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Japan.
“To make something which is its own unraveling, its own justification is something like the dream. There is no paradox, for that is only a separation from reality.” R. Tuttle, 1972
