Weaving his magic around the world

Contemporary art Exhibitions Fairs United Kingdom Trio of Richard Tuttle exhibitions includes his largest work to date in the Tates Turbine Hall

By Julia Halperin. From Frieze daily edition Published online: 14 October 2014

Less has never been as less as this, the critic Hilton Kramer wrote in a scathing review of Richard Tuttles first mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. The exhibition of unassuming worksincluding dyed, irregularly shaped canvases laid on the floor and thin wires pinned to the wallwas so poorly received that it led to the firing of one of the museums top curators.

Tuttle, however, is having the last laugh. The US artist and his traditionally marginalised media are the subject of three simultaneous exhibitions worldwide. A joint exhibition in Tate Moderns Turbine Hall and at the Whitechapel Gallery in London focuses on the artists use of textiles. Meanwhile, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine is hosting the first retrospective of Tuttles prints.

The 40m-wide installation in the Turbine Halla combination of fabrics dyed midnight blue, deep red and bright orange and hung from the ceilingis the artists largest work to date. It is also the first textile of this scale the Turbine Hall has ever seen, and the first installation since the venue temporarily closed last year to accommodate the construction of the Tates Herzog & de Meuron-designed expansion.

Inspired by India

Tuttle has worked with, collected and studied textiles for much of his career. In 1967, he created his first major series, a group of unstretched, shaped and dyed canvases that could be put on the floor or hung on the wall. It was clearly not an ordinary painting, but something that was consciously a textile, says Magnus af Petersens, the chief curator of Whitechapel. The works also distinguished him from his macho, industrial sculptor peers, such as Richard Serra and Mark di Suvero.

Tuttle developed the fabric for the Turbine Halla unique combination of rayon and natural fibresin collaboration with a textile factory in India. The process gave him a renewed appreciation for the craft. The fabrics we designed could not be more precise, Tuttle says. I am in awe of what a real textile designer does.

The artist was particularly interested in creating a fabric that blended the manmade and the natural. He is not nostalgic about pre-industrial textile production, says Achim Borchardt-Hume, the head of exhibitions at Tate Modern. Hes more interested in the space textiles occupy culturally.

In 2012, Tuttle spent ten months as a scholar and artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. When the designers in India used a technical term he did not understand, he looked it up in the Gettys library. His scholarly understanding of textiles informs a new publication, to be released in conjunction with the Tate and Whitechapel exhibitions. The book is expected to go beyond the traditional catalogue to focus on the history of textiles, and will feature photographs of his personal textile collection.

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Weaving his magic around the world