June 27 to August 12, 2016
531 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 9100

Though there all along, the issue of using a shaped support came into particular focus during the 1960s as an emphasis on both the painting as object, its unnecessary privileging of easel painting and ultimately the expendability of using only a single rectangle. In “Shapeshifters,” now at Luhring Augustine, 19 artists are brought together who explore the possibilities of a shaped support as an optional formal development. But gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay “Art and Objecthood,” though some of the exhibition’s earliest works are from that moment. There are works here that evince playfulness or Dada disregard for convention, such as Martin Kippenberger, for example, as well as a compositional exuberance of both materials and pictorial forms that ultimately set an overall shape. That is to say they find shape by an excessive build up of material itself, as in Jeremy DePerez’s Untitled (Unknown) (2016), or in working with one form or another, such as Imi Knobel’s Kartoffelbild 15 (2012) leaving those shapes to define an external perimeter edge.

Among the large-scale works in the main gallery, David Novros’s extraordinary 4:30 (1966/2000) is a multipanel painting that extends horizontally in four joined parts, two panels running horizontal and two at an angle. The parts are stepped alternately, allowing the wall to form inducted negative shapes to the positive shapes of the panels themselves. The pale tone of the white pearlescent paint changes color to a pink as the viewer moves and the light hits its surface differently. The modular panels identify the piece as an object within an architectural context — it’s as far away from the notion of painting as a window onto fictional space as can be imaged. This is now nothing to do with a perspectival view set in a rectangular portal; it is an encounter with organized physical elements in real space. Above the doorway to the other galleries is Blinky Palermo’s Untitled (1966) a nine-by-eighteen-inch black triangle of muslin over wood. This small work punctuates the architecture like a subtle votive object, altering the straightforward experience of passing through a doorway into a consideration of passing through a particular architectural space.

Several paintings in this exhibition very successfully use actual gaps within the format of the painting itself: Kippenberger’s N.G.D. hellblau (1987), Richard Tuttle’s Red Brown Canvas (1967), and Steven Parrino’s Touch and Go (1989–95) all expose the wall behind within the painting to simple, and inventive effect. Parrino’s work shows painterliness in the form of stains and drips visible along the edges and in two cut-out segments. Ruth Root combines, in Untitled (2015), fabric, Plexiglas, enamel and spray paint in a piece that fits various planes at diagonals to each other that only in the top left corner conform to a rectangle. Elsewhere they simply amass frontally as if slotted and layered together. The feel is collage, the format a construction from disparate parts.

Although stacked vertically, like Root’s painting, 3 Part Variation #5 (2011–13) by Joanna Pousette-Dart departs methodologically. Three conjoined rounded forms contain curvilinear shapes; the relationship between them is seamless, as they appear to generate one another. The color relationships are also compelling; again, moving visually backward and forward, the colors seem to call each other into being.

There is no doubt that the artist list for this exhibition could be longer, I’m thinking for example of Joe Overstreet, Alan Shields and Al Loving, to name just three. There is much very good work to be seen already here and the point is well made that a standard rectangle is not only unnecessary, but alternatives await further exploration in any number of directions and for many reasons — one being that there is no good reason not to.

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Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language at the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern, October 14 to December 14, 2014, October 16 to December 6, 2014
Pedro Cabrita Reis: The London Angles at Spovieri, 23 Heddon Street, London W1, October 16 to December 6, 2014
Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman Gallery, 5-8 Lower John Street, London W1. October 14 to December 20, 2014
Jill Baroff: For Your Love at Bartha Contemporary, 25 Margaret Street, London W1. October 14 to November 22, 2014
Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough Railway Station, Zetland Road, Middlesbrough

The Whitechapel Gallery’s recent survey of Richard Tuttle is part of a wider project that extends to a show of monumental sculpture at Tate Modern and a collaborative book with Tuttle that focuses on historic and contemporary textiles. The title for both Whitechapel exhibition and the Tate Modern sculpture, I don’t know: The Weave of Textile language, references the artists’ belief that textiles are underappreciated–Tuttle is himself an avid collector of textiles. The survey takes in a period between 1969 and 2014. Early works from 1971-2, the Wire Pieces, are typically humble yet complex and made using a simple and direct principle – a length of wire used to follow a wall drawing is then released. Now standing away from the surface and casting a shadow that reads as a vital part of the work, it completes this slight but precise composition. Slight, in this context becomes a virtue, as Tuttle eschews any obvious use of material in favor of inventive combinations of discarded (or at least not art store purchased) finds. Tuttle accompanies each work with a short poetic text. The use of words together with his choice of materials directs us to the richness of small, ubiquitous,quotidian things. In contrast, the vast sculptures at Tate Modern, the largest works Tuttle has made to date, span the extensive void of Tate’s Turbine Hall. With brilliantly colored textiles used over the planer plywood structure, it looks like a cross between a hovering schematic tree and an ancient aeronautical device. Throughout both installations, textile’s essential qualities of adaptability and ubiquity are repeated – literally, a weaving together of material in different forms for different functions. A number of London galleries currently exhibit artists who have somewhat adjacent concerns in their focus on resourcefulness and transformation across media.

Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis’ first exhibition at Spovieri, The London Angles, investigated familiar concerns for this artist. Foremost here is the window as a subject, both its literal construction and its philosophical implications vis-a-vis Renaissance concepts of framing and space. The sculptures combine vernacular elements in such a way as to cause a relational balance between sculpture, painting and architecture. Undisclosed #1, (2008), is a wall based assemblage comprising, glass, aluminum, acrylic on wood, found wood objects, armatures, fluorescent lamps and electric cables. The reconfiguration of elements familiar as parts of the built environment balance light and matter toward, as Cabrita Reis puts it, “a reality in its own right, instead of reproducing it.” The particular reconfiguration that envelops an acrylic painting on raw linen in another work situates the painting as a found object; if it weren’t under an assembled double glass and aluminum frame, for instance, it would be Ryman-like. The works often have trailing wires and even lean against gallery walls, increasing the impression of contingency and resourcefulness that results in an adequacy that never seems over worked.

The inaugural exhibition of Marian Goodman’s impressive new digs in London’s West End consisted mostly of recent work by Gerhard Richter, and is that artist’s first gallery exhibition in London on such a scale – with over 40 works –in almost 20 years. Included were new works from the three series, Strip, Flow, and Doppelgrau, as well as a glass sculpture and a number of earlier paintings. The Strip paintings are a result of photographically deconstructing a 1990 oil painting by Richter. These consist of digital prints mounted between Alu Dibond and Perspex . In Strip 926-7, (2012), which measures five by almost ten feet, the color sampled from the original painting is organized as sharp narrow horizontal bands. The ochers and greens that dominate the lower 2 thirds, and the blues and reds of the top third, pulse and oscillate rhythmically. Robert Storr has described the Strip paintings as the most retinal paintings ever produced.

Jill Baroff’s fourth exhibition at Bartha Contemporary, a gallery in the Fitzrovia district run founded in 2000 by a Swiss couple, was titled For Your Love. The installation comprised five ink drawings and a floor-based cluster of red corrugated disks in which data is scientifically amassed and aesthetically realized. Variations of phenomena recorded from the physical world – tidal movement for example – are mapped as abstract line and form. Inherent fluctuations of space and time are seen here not as statistical data, though this is their source, but as objects and images to be contemplated. The ink drawings are made on Gampi paper (discovered by the artist on recent trips to Japan) together with the wooden discs that trap changing light in their surface grooves. This characterizes Baroff’s attitude to craft and material, which are as consistently important to her as the conceptual rigor of her ideas.

Leaving London (but barely leaving the railroad car) and heading northeast to Middlesbrough, Platform A’s exhibition in that station’s former parcel delivery room brought together six artists for whom the physical forming of a painting or a sculpture is vital to any reading of completed work. The artists in this meticulously curated show – Andrew Bick, Katrina Blannin, Clem Crosby, David Ryan, Francesca Simon and Kate Terry – each in their way use gesture as a decisive formal element. This is most obvious in the paintings of David Ryan and Clem Crosby, for both of whom spontaneity and working in the moment are crucial, though this manifests differently for each artist. Ryan emphasizes adjustment and improvisation within a specific limit of contested parts – part gestural sign, part schematic shape.. Crosby’s painting on aluminum, Penmanship is desirable, (2014), on the other hand, represents the final stage of a process that allows almost complete erasure of previous states. Leaving only the trace of any moves subsequently rejected, the fluid linear event that results is – including the knots of line that create shape – almost kinetic in appearance.

Simon’s two-part painting, In Construction, (2014), is situated across a corner, one canvas on each adjacent wall. The compositional elements echo and mirror each other asymmetrically. Another multipart painting, Blannin’s Three-Piece Suite: Pink/Black (Double Hexad: Contracted Root and Expanded=123/321 Tonal Rotation), (2014), comprising three abutted horizontal panels, , deploys a repeated linear permutation across each panel. The rational logic is clear from the reflected and refracted planes that accurately meet at defined edges. From diverse directions, these artists all arrive at a notion of making as an integral part of the finished work.

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“Wonder” and “beauty” by now are clichés we’re bound to encounter when discussing visual art. How else is one to talk about it, but to opine what’s wonderful? One obvious, however difficult, answer would be to describe what one naturally sees. As Heraclitus tells us, via his curious philosophy, nature has a passion for hiding from us. With this in mind, it’s helpful to remember that even what’s defined as “natural” can be in itself an enigma; think of the eerily exact still-lifes done by countless artists throughout time. Parmenides later says that all of what’s real is alike, and that furthermore, if you find something real here, you’ll likewise find the same amount of it over there. Open to all influences, artists have found more to attend to than what’s plainly visible. And so, what’s difficult about this? Artistic independence bears its garbage as well as its gifts. Thanks to assiduous contemporaries like Richard Tuttle, whose works are motivated by both nature and imagination, viewers can throw off the visual strain of having to guess at what they’re seeing, and simply admire Tuttle’s objects for what they are.

With such an unrestraining ontological setup as the above, we can agree that what artists have to work with has no limit, and art is really a game and nothing more. In this game, the only thing to do is discover and understand — or, in the case of Richard Tuttle, to simply ask questions. Artists have always the problem of showing what it’s like to live during the time of art-making. It’s here, where very little makes sense, we can appreciate works by artists of the current milieu; here and now you can really say whatever you like. Richard Tuttle says and makes whatever he pleases. His is a polarizing endeavor, but certainly worthy of anyone’s time when done with such a steady and varied output as evinced by the new publication, Richard Tuttle: Prints, published by JRP|Ringier.

In this book, perhaps in reply to our aforementioned Classical philosophers, Tuttle reminds us that “to learn what something is, you sometimes have to reference what it is not,” a statement telling of his ever-quixotic process of making art. The book’s publication was occasioned by the exhibition “Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective” at Bowdoin College Museum of Art from June 28 through October 19 of 2014, and it demonstrates Tuttle’s sheer prolificacy and his bent for the mechanisms and outcomes of printmaking. The book is organized chronologically by exhibition, from 1963 to 2014, and from its beginning through the duration of Tuttle’s career, he makes no bones to remind us that what we’re seeing may not be what’s actually there, and questions the acts and objects we’re often to understand as being Art.

Throughout Prints, it’s difficult to discern whether a reproduced work of Tuttle’s is a drawing, a painting, a silkscreen, a woodcut, a sculpture, or a collage: a trait of diversity which remains at the center of his oeuvre. Stating that “a print is not a drawing,” we can be grateful to Tuttle and the editors for giving us examples of just what is a print. Even in the Classic example, Tuttle is making connections and analogies to the print process, such as “when Homer has Nestor ask his men to choose between fighting the Trojans or dying on their way back home, their choice is a space for a print.” To guide us along, we are given statements from the artist himself, like the dictum that “science exists to resolve problems; art is there to raise problems.” Tuttle’s approach to art is often eccentric and always investigative, to the bafflement, bemusement, and excitement of his audience.

One especially puzzling series from Prints, consists of seven woodcuts printed in colors, entitled Galisteo Paintings (1993). These prints, based on delicately painted watercolors done by Tuttle in Galisteo, New Mexico, were “translated” in the process of the woodcuts being printed. This series is an example of how Tuttle’s process is never limited to one definition or specific outcome, as it “conflates both the printing and painting techniques.” These prints appear as watercolors of flowers and birds, and the process of their making is startlingly imperceptible.

Now more than ever are categorizations like “Minimalist” or “Post-Minimalist” fitted best out the open window, and Tuttle seems to know this well. For his chosen medium of printmaking, the printing plate’s function is to deliver “information as a pen does for the writer,” and Tuttle allows a view into this work as being comparable to language, specifically with the surprising connection the book draws: through the transformation of drawing into print via its plate, a “translation” is taking place. These prints ask questions, raise them, and are meant to be dialogues in print without language.

Editor Christina von Rotenhan mentions (in a nod to Tuttle’s being an artist through-and-through) his “residing in border zones,” when interestingly, he uses even the borders and “empty” spaces in the way that one could view the spaces around letters in typography as important rudiments of the composition. Tuttle sometimes includes all parts of the printing press machinery as elements for the final object. One section of the book features a 1998 exhibition entitled “Edge,” inspired by botanical prints from the 18th century. Here, the intaglio printing plate’s edge is seen embossed on each finished print, thus obscuring “our understanding of the order of printing and the emergence of the printed images,” and making an allusion to an actual frame within the borders of each print. Funnily enough, these dynamic and colorful lines appear less botanical, and more like sketches for needlepoint in fragments. One could stare at these particular works for hours, guessing at their beginnings and endings, and the junctures at which hues blend and never really come up with any answers, because Tuttle has altogether relieved us of what we’re “supposed” to see in (or even say about) his prints.

If we’re forced to bear the old bearers of beauty, let them be of the Tuttlean stock, which adheres to the poetic rule wherein the art requires as much from you as you require from it. Richard Tuttle’s prints are startlingly neutral; his methods are totally efficient, and yet they have the capacity to lead the viewer from any individual print in a thousand other directions and spaces without indulgence, which would in any case fade. Meanwhile, Richard Tuttle’s exhibitions continue, giving viewers the close-up view of what this book tantalizingly foretastes.

Richard Tuttle: Prints (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, in co-edition with Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2014). Ed. Christina von Rotenhan. English edition. ISBN: 978-3-03764-365-5, 144 pages, $80

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Joe Fyfe, Andrea Scott, and Roberta Smith joined David Cohen to review Gilbert and George at Lehmann Maupin and at Sonnabend, Jesper Jest at Perry Rubenstein, Richard Tuttle at the Drawing Centre and Sarah McEneaney at Gallery Schlesinger.

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