Richard Tuttle: Half-Light

For more than 50 years, Richard Tuttle has been loosening the boundaries between painting, poetry, and sculpture to realize a materially light, conceptually rich body of work. Conceived in close dialogue with Tuttle, this exhibition presents two recent series: the planar 18 × 24 (2022–23) and the multifarious Good Idea (2025–26), which the artist realized in his New Mexico and Maine residences, respectively. The 18 × 24 series continues Tuttle’s lifelong exploration of the nexus between the verbal and the visual, each of the acrylic-painted Styrofoam works originating from a word drawing on an 18-by-24-inch sheet of paper. Conversely, the works in the Good Idea series are composed of reclaimed everyday materials, scattered across the gallery’s walls and floor to articulate shifting relationships among their constituent parts, one another, and the supporting architecture.

For over five decades, Richard Tuttle has been loosening the boundaries between painting, poetry, and sculpture to realize a materially light, conceptually rich body of work. Conceived in close dialogue with Tuttle, this exhibition presents two recent series: the planar 18 × 24 (2022–23) and the multifarious Good Idea (2025–26), which the artist realized in his New Mexico and Maine residences, respectively. The 18 × 24 series continues Tuttle’s lifelong exploration of the nexus between the verbal and the visual, each of the acrylic-painted Styrofoam works originating from a word drawing on an 18-by-24-inch sheet of paper. Conversely, the works in the Good Idea series are composed of reclaimed everyday materials, scattered across the gallery’s walls and floor to articulate shifting relationships among their constituent parts, one another, and the supporting architecture.

Tuttle’s unwavering pursuit of art that does not merely represent the world but participates in it under the same conditions as other physical things is reflected in the exhibition’s title, Half-Light, which the artist once defined as both an atmospheric effect and a streaming of time: “The stream of half-light, or candlelight, dawn or dusk, impenetrable light, an experimental nature full of prickly, coagulated stoppages, too dense to enter, a false matter, or matter in name only—not the concrete—a kind of mock concrete, to those who know the difference.” For Tuttle, half-light is a threshold state in which perception resists fixed meaning and materials seem to hover between actuality and idea. This understanding of the concept, together with the perceptual and affective atmosphere half-light produces, unfolds through the two bodies of work contrapuntally installed in this gallery.