Tuttle was born in
Rahway, New Jersey and raised in nearby
Roselle. He studied art, philosophy and literature at
Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut from 1959 to 1963. were followed by making palm-size paper cubes with cut-out designs and shaped wood reliefs that seemed like a twist on geometric abstraction. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he began to create eccentrically-shaped painted wood reliefs, followed by ideograms made of galvanized tin, and unstretched, shaped canvases dyed in offbeat colors. Tuttle had a survey exhibition in 1975 at the
Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit was controversial and the show's curator
Marcia Tucker lost her job as a result, after a scathing review by
Hilton Kramer. Kramer, then
art critic for
The New York Times, wrote, referring to
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's dictum "
less is more", "in Mr. Tuttle's work, less is unmistakably less ... One is tempted to say, where art is concerned, less has never been as less than this". According to art critic Christopher Knight of the
Los Angeles Times, Tuttle's
Wire pieces, which the artist made in 1971 and 1972, "collectively rank as his most distinctive contribution to art history". In 1983, Tuttle made ''Monkey's Recovery for a Darkened Room (Bluebird)'', a wall relief of branches, wire, cloth, string and wood scraps, which he says formally relates to
Jan van Eyck's
Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych. The illustration from the suite
5 Loose Leaf Notebook Drawings from 1980 to 1982, in the collection of the
Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates how the suites challenge viewers to contemplate the distinction between fine art and trash. His works in the 1990s consisted mostly of smaller-sized work, followed by bodies of low-relief wall-bound pieces that integrate painting, sculpture, and drawing. Tuttle has always "privileged newness, not found or weathered elements that refer to past lives and experiences,"
Sharon Butler wrote in a
Two Coats of Paint review of "Days, Muses and Stars," his 2019 expansive multiple-gallery exhibition at Pace. "The distinctive feature of his aesthetic endeavor is his reverence for the present. His objects, though they may convey a sense of
wabi-sabi precariousness, are invariably made of pristine materials that reflect the proximate experience of making." Tuttle's work has been extremely influential on a younger generation that has embraced the
casualism that he pioneered.
Textile works During a residency at
The Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1978, Tuttle embraced the silkscreen printing process and the idea of fabric to make a series of clothing —
Shirts in 1978 and
Pants in 1979. ''I Don't Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language'', on view at the
Tate Modern in 2014, was made for the museum's turbine hall and is Tuttle's largest to date spanning nearly 40 feet in length. Featuring the textiles he designed and fabricated, the work is suspended from the ceiling in contrast to the hall’s industrial architecture. ==Exhibitions==