Included in the exhibition are 12 works made of acrylic, graphite, cloth and linen on spun plastic, adhered to the wall. Below each work, its complement is painted directly on the wall in black paint. The result of the installation in the small gallery is a concentrated gathering of color and form, the black paint below each work a small and striking surprise. As usual, finding the wealth in limited means, Tuttle has achieved a poetics of loss and transcendence.

Since the 1960s, Richard Tuttle has devised objects whose status is not quite sculpture or drawing or painting but some combination of the three, and whose humor, tenderness and ambition has been a revelation given their small-scale and everyday materials.

The artist’s current retrospective, The Art of Richard Tuttle, began at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last summer and is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through February 2006. It continues its tour through June 2007 at the Des Moines Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.