A brush with... Richard Tuttle

A Brush With is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the Arts and Culture Platform. Created by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg Connects lets you access museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand, download the app to access digital guides and explore a variety of content. Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from the Art newspaper in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and, of course, other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. And this episode is a brush with Richard Tuttle, who combines elements of drawing, painting, sculpture, artist books, printmaking and textiles, often arranged in lyrical installations, yet does not settle in anyone discipline or medium. Pushing and pulling between different forms and modes, and between two and three dimensions, he's developed a singular response to architecture, which is often activated in unexpected ways by the placement of the objects he makes and their arrangement in spatial compositions. And while the meaning of the works is often as elusive as their form, they offer poetic enticement for their audience through a delight in broad and often humble materiality and a fertile relationship with different forms of language. Richard is seen as a leading figure in post-minimalism and certainly contributed to the liberating approach to form, matter and content that that tendency heralded from the 1960s, but any attempt to neatly categorise his output feels profoundly inadequate and limiting, experiencing his exhibitions on feels part of a philosophical response to the world, a questioning of what it is to inhabit it and what it might mean to make art in it and an open sense of dialogue. As Richard himself said in 1975, "If the artist does a piece of real work and we see it, it's as though we ourselves are doing it." Richard was born in 1941 in railway in New Jersey and grew up in nearby Rozele. Today, he lives and works in New York, a bequeue in New Mexico and Mount Desert in Maine. He studied at Trinity College in Hartford, in Connecticut, between 1959 and 1963. While at Trinity, he made formative visits to the Wadsworth Athaneum, the museum in Hartford, and formed a friendship with its recently hard curator of painting Sam Wagstaff, who, in 1964, curated black, white, and grey, regarded as the first exhibition exploring minimalist art. Through Wagstaff, Richard was introduced to a dynamic and at that point, growingly disparate contemporary art scene, weekends were spent in New York, he recalled, witnessing the birth of pop and the classic period for happenings and meeting the artists at that time. After leaving Trinity, he made what a widely regarded, his first mature works, the untitled paper cubes of 1964, made from plain cardstock and all 7.5 centimetres on each side. The cubes are perforated with different shapes, some resembling letters, a trait that's continued in his work up to today, others creating simple geometric apertures like triangles and rectangles within the cubic form. That same year, Richard began a job as an assistant at Betty Parsons Gallery, a leading New York avant-garde space. Within a year, he had his first show at the gallery. At 1965, Exhibition introduced his constructed paintings, all of which began with drawings from which he created a template to cut the shapes out of two thin sheets of wood, retaining the drawings and even organic line which he then joined with strips of wood at the sides. He then painted each one in uniform colour, applied in many layers to achieve the right intensity of hue. Again, certain forms resemble letters, others some form a pictogram or symbol, but it's always been important to Richard that he tries, in his words, to make something that looks like itself, avoiding clear reference to specific bodies, objects or places. These and the works made in the following decade have provided the kernel for Richard's remarkably broad output over more than 60 years, letters the 26 series, known as the Tim pieces, more explicitly engaged with the alphabet, made in 1966, using a similar process to the constructed paintings but with galvanised iron, the series was first presented on a table and viewers were encouraged to touch and pick up these metal shapes. The pieces also been installed on the wall and on the floor, reflecting the flexibility and sensitivity of Richard's works to environment and audience. The same is true of the series that followed, pieces of cut canvas that played with octagonal shapes which were dyed rather than painted, again reflecting an interest in unconventional technique. Steadily, he pushed the ephemeralty of his forms with a paper octagonal series of 1970 and then with a wire works made between 1971 and 1974. In these latter pieces, wire would be stretched between two points either informed by or prompting graphite drawings. In some works, he would stretch the wire, draw along its shape on the wall and then release the wire to hang freely where it would cast a shadow to provide a third element of the composition. The spare humdrum materiality of Richard's work is at its height in ten kinds of memory and memory itself from 1973, an installation in which pieces of string are used to make sculptural drawings on the floor, placed or thrown according to various movements including sitting, kneeling, standing and so on. An important series was the collage pieces of 1978 which began with cut paper but extended onto the wall, again sitting between painting, drawing and low-release sculpture. It's impossible to describe his vast earth since sequentially but much of it has taken the form of collage or assemblage, with sometimes hugely disparate elements brought together intuitively or by system and often exposing the journey of their making. In many series such as the India Works from 1980 or when we were at home from 2002, the frame for so long a confining element of pictorial convention is a springboard for endless innovation and experiment. Richard's experience of place is tremendously significant, his move to New Mexico in the late 1980s and the overwhelming impression of its expansive landscape prompted an installation called Inside the Still Pure Form in 1990. This was typical of the total environments in which he hangs or places works in multiple media surrounded by wall paintings and major development in his approach to the exhibition as a medium in itself. Richard's seen as an anti-monumental artist since he employs smaller formats than many contemporary artists, but he shows a mastery of scale in these room installations and in the rare but impressive large-scale sculptures that he's made, including the piece for Take Modern's turbine hall called I Don't Know the Weave of Textile Language in 2014, which still kept a sense of touch in the casual draping of brightly coloured fabric over vast wooden forms suspended in the cathedral-like space. One constantly sees evidence of Richard's handling of his materials and intimate connection between him and us. When he was discussing a beautiful series called Forty Days made in 1989, an abstract response to global travel, he said, "I would prefer to think that language and image are two worlds constantly seeking stability, the best possible relationship the two can have that's neither language nor image, and that's what the drawings are about. Between language and image, between painting and sculpture, between the humdrum and the metaphysical, this fertile, uncertain space is where the magic of Richard's work happens. But under pinnacle is drawing as exemplified in two exhibitions opening in 2026, a show of small sculptures of the 1970s at Modern Art in London, and a major presentation at Dia Beacon in New York State called Half Light, featuring recent works made in Maine and New Mexico. And it's this with which I began our conversation. Whenever I see Richard's work, I feel his hand drawing whatever material he may be using. So I ask Richard to tell us more about drawing as the fundament of everything he does. I think one of the first statements I was asked to give when I was 22 about my work, that the line was drawing will change before art will, because it's very hard to say what drawing is, but in putting it in the way I put it at 22, it puts it in this position that you could say a motivator for art, which a lot of people might think is bigger, but without the proper motivator in place, you can't expect the bigger thing to be as good as it can be. You used a phrase, and I love this phrase, the way a line talks. And one of the things about, if you like, the elasticity or the openness of drawing, is it has such a wealth of properties that I imagine must therefore be an enormous pleasure to use in all its different manifestations. Absolutely, but I've learned after all these years of working that the line I've decided to use, and this is a point I think for all artists where you have to just make a decision one day that this is going to be your way and you're going to leave the rest for somebody else. Right. But the line I use, I've come to understand, is not a pure line like most people would think, it's actually the edge of something. Yes. And I could say that this side of that edge, we're here, if we, whatever we know or can experience is available in that sense, but as the edge that the line is, we don't know what's on the other side of that. And so it's has this, I mean, for me, a fascinating quality that supported a 65 year old career to constantly turn up new and interesting directions and understandings and intensifies being alive. I mean, the edge side of things, I think, is really born out in all the different ways in which you'll work a piece. is in a sense that I'm really conscious that you use the edge of the architecture when you hang your paintings and your works on the wall, right? So these works will go right up to the edge of a wall rather than being perfectly placed slap bang in the middle of the wall and somehow that makes the architecture drawing and so on. You want to employ the different elements of the space as active, almost living elements of the work, right? Yeah, that's another statement I popped out of my mouth one day that I said that you can have what you can draw and I want it all. So drawing is my methodology to have it all, clearly. I just made this big installation of Dia in Beacon in New York and there are two halves of the room. The one half that is really concerns itself with a circular time. The pieces come right to the edge of this vast room. So that the edge of the work which is a line after all corresponds to the edge of this architecture and fund a characteristic of circular time is that we know the beginning and the end is the same. We might not know what that is but at least we know they're the same. So this room architecturally offers the possibility to point that out whether it's implicit in human understanding is beyond my job level, you know, but I tried my best. Yeah, what's interesting to me it seems is that in using the space to its fullest in animating elements of the space which other artists might assume to be dead in some way, the work moves even despite the fact that it might be a static object. The animating element comes from within the works but also from the outside of it if you know what to mean. So that as a viewer we are conscious that our role is powerful. We know that we are maybe it's expected of us that we're going to engage somehow and that we can bring to it an element which keeps that animation or keeps that livingness active. Yeah, I think that's hugely important and we've seen really almost a hundred year history in art where the artists have tried to get the art onto the viewer's side but I think quite exciting like we are at a watershed now where it's turning around and as it turns around the artist becomes where the community had been and then serves the community which results I think in a plus plus relationship between art and the community and the artist is meant to serve that purpose because I've always thought I want a lifelong creative career and because I perhaps sensed early on that it takes a lifetime to do what I'm hoping to do and so the fluidity as we change we've experienced you know philosophical aesthetic, additudinal, revertuals you know which nothing else seems to be able to sustain such extremities and indeed that's sort of probably a reflection of our life on this earth and which I humbly submit is content for art. And part of that is sort of keep quoting you back at yourself but this idea of you've talked about handling and welcoming contradiction and it seems to me that if art is doing something well and part of what you're describing there it seems to me is in that territory of somehow recognizing that there are multiple elements at play and we don't have to be absolutely certain and indeed contriving that uncertainty and contriving reversals and the unexpected effectively. Yes yeah I think we're in the same mind about these some of these issues but you know the creative life or life of creativity is supposed to keep one on the key v or the edge of the most exciting parts of what art life has to offer and I also always believe somehow nobody ever taught me this but I have this belief that life is actually a crescendo it's meant to get better and better and bigger and more itself as we progress and I think it seems to be happening in my case I don't put myself out to be ideal in any case but I try to be representative you know I try to be a representative you know that's all I want to do is be representative and do you want your art to be a positive force in your viewers crescendo then in that sense well 150% yeah you've talked about that sort of art as a kind of nutrition for our own alive and that's part of that building that kind of wanting life to get better for the viewer through the art even if it's in small ways even if it's in a subtle kind of revelation that one sees through the work yeah I mean on the one hand I think since I was born I've had not thought about anything else except art I don't know I mean that's that's what my birth seemed to be about and it's tough to live in the States there's a tremendous anti-art establishment inside the culture and so to be born thinking that art is the only thing that's important and to go out on the street and find nobody to agree with this is a daily challenge I'm sure it is but then when you do meet like minded people and when you do become part of a community of artists therefore it must be tremendously reassuring and it seems to me you have benefited hugely that you have gained food for your inner life from those relationships from those communities that you've been part of yes it is true and they what is it back to that what I was saying about wanting it all I mean any given time in any person civilization whether you're living in Borneo or London or the Amazon you're only going to have a part of the whole you know of what it all is so my evil little brain quite as a child I thought well you know I mean somebody you know with the creative dimension could fill in what it's absent you know and in ex-case you know somebody will call me an artist artist because I do think there's some level where community I mean if you're born in artists really you're outside the community and and then you're in the community of other artists whether they're alive or they're dead or what part of the world they're from or what gender they are what you know the sexual predilections they enjoy or whatever you know like it's a community that people who kind of support each other one of the ways you recognize an artist is from their generosity you know it's just absolutely a given you know that artist is a generous person one of the aspects of your work which I most enjoy is the kind of somewhat accidental but they're not accidental elements of it for instance your work is about as good in terms of shadows as any work I've ever seen I love the shadows roll within the activation of the pieces and so on obviously this is something you have nurtured in the sense that you know I think of the wire works but also some of those works which use the sort of openness of frames and so on you know how carefully can you curate the shadow that appears from your work because of course you can deal with lighting but I mean is there an active process when you hang your works when you're making works in the studio where you're thinking very directly about the shadows that are cast by them is it a very fundamental piece of the creation of the work do you know I did a show at the tape the turbine hall yeah and part of the title was I don't know he was yeah and I even made a little button that said I don't know because I thought everybody was supposed to make a show like that was supposed to make a button because Gillian wearing had made a button for her show we said ask Gillian so anyway my button said I don't know and people loved it you know because it's so hard to say I don't know you know that if you're wearing a button that says that you know you're over the over the problem but I think we never have everything there's also a case where we have what we're given is a channeled or a kind of it seems to come under a restriction and I mean they're what barriers boundaries of things that are allowable things that are not allowable I think if you're born an artist it just doesn't make sense I mean after all you learn them you know and you cope with and I think that most societies have a problem with artists because they can't learn boundaries but but then on the other end the societies that can cope with people who don't know their boundaries you know are at some of the greatest levels of human civilization ever ever reached you know so I like to participate that way there's like an expression I haven't heard it for a long time and I don't really know the reasons I heard it originally but this a simple sentence the day I discovered myself and I had the day like that where the difference who I was before I discovered myself and who I was after I discovered myself is palpable and I mean it's just like I find it very hard to live in the world as the discovered self but a lot of my work is how get to live in the world as my discovered self. Right. And that probably would include the shadows, you know, because as the undiscovered, so I don't have any idea what you're talking about. You know, modern civilization, which is also a subject, I haven't heard it brought to the table that recently, but it's arduous. And especially, I think if, I mean, the more you're on the fringe, the more arduous it is. And then what you do to compensate can seem like it's a form of the schizophrenia. So the next question you ask me, I could say, well, Ben, would you like the answer from the undiscovered self, or would you like the answer from the discovered self, you know? And really, I could answer it either way. It's all the same. So what I'm detecting from that then is that in a way, your approach to your work is to be completely open to anything that could occur within it, to have precise materials, but to be open to what it suggests to you as much as what you suggest to it, in other words. It's so intensely more interesting what my work wants to tell me than what I can tell you or somebody else or it or, and I think as I get older, the discipline, which is intense, is directed exactly to keep as open as possible to what it wants to show me. You know, I think even, I mean, in this world, we have a rich, fantastically, you could say infinitely rich possibilities when you think every molecule could be looked at, you know, in infinite number of ways, and then how many molecules there are in the world? What can one really look at and hope to see in a way that actually exercises all our capacities as human beings? So I think the only way to have that is by asking the work to show us what it wants to show us. Then you walk away with just that and somebody else might think, I want a million dollars or I want best house on the block or something like that. I mean, to walk away with only what the work wants to show you is everything, right? It's absolutely everything. My mother would observe that I'm not stable. Nothing can make me stable except having what my work wants to show me and be stabilized in the sense of gratitude. I'm also spending a lot of time writing these days and so one of the exciting things of course is coming closer to what words mean, like the word gratitude. The way I just used it, I'm proud because I think I've put a meaning or found a meaning in it that I haven't been able to get to otherwise. Let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests. Who was the first artist whose work you loved? Modigliani. Oh wow, okay. Where did you first encounter Modigliani's work? Probably through some kind of magazine, the preps in art publication, but a little bit nervous because we share the same birthday and I wonder if that's my liking of him is colluded by, and I mean, even physically, we have a resemblance, physical resemblance, and the kind of romantic side of life and so on. There's a lot of some ways, but I didn't have to die as young as he. But by the time I was 20, I considered Modigliani an artist who juveniles like, but now he's back in favor and I'm glad of that. I'm really interested in the fact that you saw your paternal grandfather drawing when you were a child and it was almost like a magical moment to you. Is that right? He was making a drawing for your brother over the sound of it. Yes, and that's part of this physical response. I mean, after all, all of us are on our path and we're trying to find our way and there are a certain moments that just happen in the in the flow of daily life, which rivet us and then the point that's the road, that's the direction. And so this story you just told is definitely one of those ur moments in my life. Yeah, it seems to be quite extraordinary. Everything I've seen that you've said about your childhood, it suggests that you knew you wanted to be an artist like really early on. It wasn't like, once you're in high school and doing senior projects towards the end of that process, it was when you were a very young child, you knew somehow that you wanted to be an artist. Tell us about that. I hit on that a little bit before this notion of since that first moment of being in this world of, you know, thinking about art. And of course, each generation has a different definition of art and how they think about it will be characteristic of what they think art is and so on so. But you know, and I have looked all through the world and through history to find the best or the most adequate or the most useful definition of art and particularly like the one who comes from China where the notion is the art is something that moves from the not alive to being alive. And therefore, the artist is someone who is able to take materials that are definably not alive and make them alive. So that transition, it gets, of course, a little close to the whole shamanistic notion of things. And I think probably if I had been born in the Amazon and lost tribe or something, I probably would have functioned as a shaman. I mean, an artist like Joseph Boyce, for example, as much as I have a lot to respect his work, he didn't actually cut loose from the shaman enough to the artist side of things. And right now, a very respected artist is going around town calling me a shaman and I have to shut her up somehow or another because it's a different thing. It's for different purposes. I think part of what civilization is, is we can, we've developed so we can empower nature. We're not taking, we're not being empowered by nature. This is to me, is so important and so the difference between who we are, the potential and where we're going as a species, you know. So it's a big edge to manage or navigate, I guess is it? Yeah. Current word, yeah. Absolutely. Which historical artist do you turn to the most today? Yeah, and then Ike. Ah, are you looking at particular works by him or the entire earth? Is there something that you're responding to? Because there's so many specific details one could zoning on, right? Well, yeah, starting from the fact that he worked with his brother, we don't know much about him. Yeah. But we do know that he worked in Bruce and I also love the artist, James Ensor, who worked in in Austin, which is right next to Bruce. And I relish the fact they both worked in the same light, you know, their colors are pair of connection. But further on you, you ask what painting I would like and it would be the adoration of the mystic lamb, which is a Van Ike painting. So that's, that's Van Ike to me. Well, it's an extraordinary painting. We'll come back to that too. But while you said it, actually, you mentioned Ensor there, and I wanted to pick up on that because you made a very direct response in Austin in 2017. You did a show where you responded very directly to Ensor. And one of the interesting things about Ensor, it seems to me, is there's a lovely text that was actually part of the information about that exhibition by Ensor. He's talking about the active properties of the colors. He ends it by saying, how is one to manage this beautiful crowd talking about the colors, you know, and personifying the colors, you know, and that seems to me to be so much part of your work. The way that color is part of your work is both subtle and then you get these amazing bursts of beautiful, rich color. You know, a lot of what you're doing is managing the beautiful crowd of colors, isn't it? Well, yes, because I think Ensor and I would agree 100% that you never see the same color twice. And therefore color is incredibly alive, you know, and it can show itself in subtleties on one moment and then burst into something radically brilliant the next moment. I mean, it feeds into life and the way we live where we're more and more asked to submit to systems and cultures that are committed to repetition. And it's even say you don't believe in repetition. You'd be ostracized. I mean, luckily people don't understand what you mean, you know, if they could be in the office of planet in a second. In other words, that distinctiveness about color with every different experience. And also, as you say, in different lights, you know, color performs so differently under so many different conditions, right? But you can exploit that in the work. a certain degree, right? - Well, you know, there seems to be an intelligence, a logic that is working for us. It's not passive at all. I think the hardest, hardest thing a human being can do, any of us can do, is to do nothing. Absolutely nothing, you know. And that's what the artist has to do, you know, to receive the instructions, you know, from their work. And even when the instructions come, there's bound to be a reaction coming from our conditioning or our tastes or our beliefs or something, you know. And that all stands in the way of knowing what the work actually has entered. Like, for example, even color, we don't know what color is. I mean, I'm very enjoying at the moment the notion that color that we don't know about is in a parallel relationship with our thinking, which we don't know anything about, you know. And so somehow in those, I don't know what they are things, you know, we can actually get some place, and which is really good for us, you know. What is good for us, you know, but something like that, I would say is good for us. But it's also something like it's been well-documented in theory and philosophy and so on, that there is something about the condition of color that is also similar to the condition of music and the way that we don't hear the same thing twice either, you know, even if there is the repetitive condition of listening to something on a recording, it still appears different because of the environment we listen to it, the people we listen to it with and so on. So there were properties that color and music and sound generally share. And it seems to me that that's another thing that's there in your work. - Well, I can go into a Benjamin Moore paint shock now and just look at these colors that are on display there and just be all struck the same way if I go to a concert and I hear these musicians who are playing notes that some composer made of God knows when and they're putting their heart and soul into them and making this event that any of us have in a pre-judged condition. And I think that's one of the greatest things art does for us is walks us very gently and gradually to a pre-judged condition. - Let's talk about contemporaries, which contemporaries do you most admire? - Okay, well, my first answer is Nanjun Puk and then my second answer and I run for get this in is my great, great respect and adulation and gratitude to the enormously important artist Agnes Martin. - I wanted to talk about Agnes 'cause I love Agnes so much and I mean, it seems to me there's this amazing thing that happens which is you meet her in '63, right? Just at that point when the grid work is really coming into this crescendo, you know? So can you tell me about me because is it right? You should have just rang her up, you admired her and so you rang her up and then went to meet her and so on. - There was a great situation in Hartford, Connecticut because of a major cutting edge curator named Sam Wankstaff who made an exhibition called Black, White and Gray. In that exhibition Agnes' work was exhibited. So this was the fall of the year I graduated. As a friend of Sam's, I went up to see the opening of the show as did Agnes and as did other New York artists who were in the show, Dent Slavin for example and Robert Morris. So we were all on the same train together and I happened to be in the same car with Agnes and I saw her walking down the aisle and this voice in my head just shouted, you know, this person has something to say to me and this is just one of those what I say these moments when you were just in the flow of life, you know, and then something points and says this is the direction, you know? And but I mean, you know, incredibly shy and what unwashed I could not call her until I actually enlisted in the Air Force, you know, throwing my life away for the next 54 years I wanted to be a pilot and they don't make you a pilot without, you know, a lot of money that they expect to have returned. And so when I threw my life away, I went to the phone booth in front of the enlistment station and called her who, you know, she was what about five blocks away and she answered and then said come over and that's how we first met. But the, I also, because I threw my life away, I had a pitiful savings that I could buy art with. So I bought her first grip drawing, you know, on that. Because in which I think is one of those meaningful parts and real art because, you know, we, you know, so fixed on this idea, it comes from the individual where if you look carefully, it's always connected to another human being. It's in another, so I became like the other human being when she painted the grits, you know, for 10 years of these glorious paintings. It's like talking about education, you know, it's like you can't beat it. A 10-year period, which is one of the greatest 10-year periods in the history of art, right? So, yeah, yeah. I want to probe that a bit because you bought this drawing. I know you've spoken about collecting, you collect to learn rather than just to collect. So I'm just wondering how much is that drawing given you over the years, you know? And do you turn to specific moments to you? Will there be a moment where you think I need to go and look at that drawing? Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, I think with the Agnes' work, she herself said it was a lucky day when I got the grid. You know, she worked through inspiration and, you know, inspiration as a life of its own two and it gives you this one day and that the next day, but she was saying the day that inspiration gave her the grid was a great day. I've come to think many things about it, but probably one of the most important is back to the question of line that cultures that are dominant or in ascendancy at the moment are based on the line. But the line that is being used by in ascendancy is actually a bifurcated line. And what Agnes did in getting the grid was to unbifurcate the line. And this puts us in a position to see ourselves, make ourselves better, correct errors, all the good, good things that are possible. She opened up for us by unbifurcating this line. She represents an artist to me who will give back every day and something new that you haven't known before. Her sources and resources of her art are so rich that there's something that happens in art every once in a while, you could call it vortex. And what art wants to happen is made by different lines coming from globular directions that all cross close enough or very close to a point. Art history will talk about minimal and it'll talk about post-minimal. But there was something that happened between minimal and post-minimal that's like where this vortex happened. And it can be hard to perceive these things, but if you're trying to work as a creative artist, you have to go in there and wrestle out what you require to do the kind of, in my case, I always found, I want to be true to my generation, of course, but I also felt that the post-war achievements in New York art was so great and that it was being forgotten. And I saw as a young person that part of my job as an artist was to reverse that and to, you could even say, build on that height and an agnus in her own way felt comfortable with the abstract expressionists as well. And then, I think, in my case, she, as far as what we were trying to do, the world calls as post-minimalist, agnus was completely hip to those issues and was an inspiration. So this vortex, what I'm trying to describe as a vortex, is a most art historians don't really have a place for it, but working artists, you absolutely need to be aware of this going on, because, in that sense, it's a job, and it's more fun to do a good job than a poor job. And a brush with Isponsor by Bloomberg connects the free art and culture platform. Bloomberg connects offers access to more than 1,600 organizations through a single click. New guides are added regularly and recent editions reflect the breadth of US institutions on the platform from the center of Southwest Studies in Durango, Colorado, to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Madora in North Dakota, and G's Bend in Alberta in Alabama. Also, on Bloomberg connects our host of museums and galleries that have held solo exhibitions of Richard Tuttle's work from the White Chapel Gallery and Camden Art Center in London to the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dia Art Foundation in New York. On the guide to the Dia Art Foundation, you can read about Richard's exhibition at Dia Beacon that opened in July, 2026, called Half Light. Also, on the guide are a wealth of presentations from Diaz Remarkable Collection and Exhibitions, including former guests on this podcast, René Green's show The Equator has moved. You can also explore the other Diaz sites, including Dia Chelsea, in whose section you can hear audio features on David Lamellis' exhibition The Machine, which continues until the 16th January 2027, and watch videos of Diaz' constellation of public sculptures and land art, including Waterton Marriars, The Lightning Field, Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. To explore digital guides to all the partnering institutions, download the app today. It's available from the App Store and Google Play, and you can keep up to date by following Bloomberg, connects on Facebook and Instagram. What do you have pinned to your studio wall? OK. This is a Philip Adder Runger. Fantastic. Do you know Philip Adder? Yeah. Romantic, but I know his colour theory more than I know his, because he's a romantic painter, right? I don't know much about the romantic paintings, but I know the colour theory. Yeah. Yeah. No, he died very young, and he's overshadowed by Casper David Friedrich, but he's extremely important. He's in that post-Cantean world, you know, where we're just trying to deal with the shake-up. And you wound up with a kind of polarization. I mean, Hegel years later as a philosopher, unified everything, but everybody else was like, we're broken down into reds and blues and conservatives and liberals and all that stuff, you know. And so where we are today, you know, but the Philip Adder Runger, actually, for me, based his dreams of the achievement of art on the figure, whereas Casper David Friedrich based it on the landscape, and for sure, a lot of the art that's happened since Casper David has followed the landscape, including Agnes, for example, yeah. But my predilection is for Runget, who was a very smart guy, I mean, he knew, even though he died of consumption, he knew that his art was the kind of art that was going to continue to inspire generation generations for 150 years. So he didn't worry about, he didn't complete his work, he knew it would be completed for him, which I think is actually the case. So I think in, for example, my relationship with Agnes, that my work is actually trying to deal with the figure, and people seem to be comfortable calling it abstraction, you know, or objects, or this or that, that, that, that, but somehow some people will be able to understand, deeply understand that it's real nature, it's figuration. And from Runget, you can look at Runget and say in a way that you are one of those people that are continuing his work. Yes, and no, because of this split, that this cycle that Runget was in the beginning of as early romantic, you know, kind of finished with Donald Judd, you know, and actually I would like to enjoy a exhibition of Runget's work and Donald Judd's work, it would be like unbelievable, with so eye opening, you know, like people would never, in a million years, guess there's this relationship, a profound relationship between the two. I think I'm a, and I always will be an archaic version of a creative cycle. My job was how to get the show on the road after it ended, you know, which museum do you visit most frequently? The Met. Is it right that you, at some point, I mean, obviously you spend time in different parts of the US now, but is it right that you used to go to the Met every Friday? Yes, and certainly in New York, it still is, I was just there a couple of weeks ago, and oddly enough, somebody has pointed this out, it's quite brilliant, the Met is figure-based, you know, and how a great museum like that can choose between, you know, because it is, it's like a dialectic thing, you know, either your landscape-based or, or your like, the moment is landscape-based, you know, and do you know the artist Charles Ray? Of course, yeah, he's been on this podcast. Oh, yes, oh, yes, good, well, yeah, I love Charles. His work looks like figure, but it's actually landscape, and when you see that, he had a show at the Met, you know, and it just clashed, you know, work just crumbled, and it was a friend of mine who pointed this out, it's because the Met is figure-based, and his work looks figure-based, you know, but it isn't, it just didn't work. So do you mean that the collection is dominantly figurative, or that the combination of collection plus building somehow makes it a space for the figurative, to what you mean by it being, because I'm curious about this idea. Yeah, I am, too, and I think as we go on, we could get to a point where, you know, how is art derived from the figure? And so with the Met, you could go back and say, it's easy to do the founding, the board, because they actually, there were a bunch of, I think, six rich guys, and then they decided to invite six artists, successful artists of the time, you know. They all collected the C&E's, the masters, you know, and all that, you know, everything was, you know, figuration, figuration, you know, portraiture is a big, big deal. I mean, say, I don't want to get too speculative, but you could look at the wave of art and see it break when the late 18th century, you know, quite involved with philosophical issues. So if we look at the UK and Germany at that moment, we see a extremely interesting dialogue going on about the object. And at the heart, the object was like David Humzey, as a, you know, concerning human understanding and like, then you had the comp where his great moment was the realization that every walking homo sapiens has cognition, nobody ever thought of that before, you know. And that this simultaneously ended, ended a period and then created this new area of profound exploration that everybody took up. And what I'm saying, and this is the first time that there even come close to saying this, is that that wave of exploring cognition ended with minimal. And then the, the phase I'm involved with, the proper question would be, well, what's cognition? And you yourself said, like this notion of drawing, you know, it's like, it's not drawing for drawing, you know, it's drawing as a tool to examine cognition, you know, every time you draw a line, you know, there has to be, according to them, there has to be cognition in that. Well, I'm not so sure. All right. Yeah. Also, you, you mentioned very well this issue of whether the work looks under conscious control or not on conscious control, and I, I even try to make something where you could look at it. And you could say, well, the person who made this, like cares, you know, 10,000 percent about every single detail, or another person could look at it, and they could say this person who made it, doesn't care anything about it, you know, like that. I mean, that's, that's the place. That's the place I find most fecund, you know, and the, yeah, yeah, I mean, I want to look at, you know, yeah, absolutely. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world? Adam Bob. Right. So, you would have been four years old, right, when the first atom bomb was dropped. Yes. And, you know, people discount four years old is not having a thinking pattern. But one of Agnes' great lines is that we're smarter at four years old, and we are at any other point in our lives, I went to Japan, I went to Hiroshima, I just, like physically dropped my bags, and my body just took over control, and I went to ground zero, and just stayed for five hours, you know, with, oh, I was recently in Japan, and my curator there brought up the subject, and I mentioned my guilt, and just tears started falling. And she said, "As a Japanese, don't feel guilty. I can't believe those words could ever happen." Which writers or poets do you return to? It's kind of boring. I'm going to say Keats and Shakespeare, Homer, Aristotle, and Virgil, but it's not a bad bunch to be fair. I'm proud of myself, I'm reading Homer and Aristotle and the original Greek and Virgil on the island in this Latin. No, well, okay. It takes some time. You know, I really, really, the difference between the original and translation is hugely important. How amazing. But this is something that seems to me to be a consistent practice of yours, because I know you speak Japanese as well, right, and you've read books in Japanese as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So tell us about that. You know, one of the reasons we ask this question about literature and so on is, you know, I'm interested in how learning languages, for instance, might help you develop your art, because it must. You know, it's not just about the reading, but the mode of thinking that can be shared between the act of reading and the act of making something and so on. So luckily, I'm married to a great poet, and she is simply the most verbal person I've ever met in my entire life. This is Mae Mae Bersenbrugge, right? Mae Mae Bersenbrugge, yes, the recent Robert Frost poetry medal on her winner. But my own head works so that when it goes into the visual mode, I lose my verbal skills exponentially. I'm. And so, of course, I love listening to her words, because they're great there, and she's so verbal, you know, and it's beautiful. But then we have a fight or a tiff, and then instead of being able to fight back verbally, I go into my visual side, and I can't defend myself. You know, one of my interests at the moment is using art to learn about how it works for us, because, you know, I think after the Second World War, the field of content for art just exploded, and that art became a kind of tool where you can examine all kinds of relations of emotions and time, or how like a fact will develop through the brain and your experience, and all these things are become available. And indeed, as the other side of the guilt, I feel because I think if the Second World War was fought for a good reason, it helps the guilt. You know, if we actually had to do that to make ourselves better, or the world better, then okay, it's more acceptable than if it was just pure destruction, you know. For example, I just idea in Beacon, New York, just installed a room in which had been occupied by Andy Warhol's shadow paintings, and I find, you know, he's an absolute genius, but the negativity is so horrendous. You know, I know people who've had Mariam and Rosa, and they just can't live with it, you know, because after a while, it's just this too negative for living daily your life, you know. So I think this work I put in 122 pieces, and I think each one is a positive force. It's like an exorcism of Warhol. Well, I mean, again, you know, there's a huge appetite for the negative, and, you know, my reputation isn't Andy's, you know, and one reason is because I'm not feeding the appetite for negativity, you know, the way he is. So my guys can figure this stuff out, you know, not me. We've already talked about music, but what music or other audio do you listen to while you're working? Okay, so I need absolute silence, and I like to have my head, my mind, as empty as possible. So I would not be the kind of person to play music, doing the work, you know, yeah. And, you know, a young person asks this question, well, what happens when you do your work, you know, and the answer I gave was that it's like the God enters, and in my work several times I've made a piece later as suggested to me that it looks like Apollo, the God Apollo. And then I thought, well, it's a little bit like I made that distinction between the discovered self and the undiscovered self, you know, and like it's like the discovered self is like the Apollo, you know, or like the Apollo thing, you know, and the undiscovered self is without Apollo. Because there is, I would say, a tremendous musicality about your work. There are rhythms, you know, the language that we use about music is sort of deeply embedded in the language we use about sculpture and painting, of course. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if you would aspire in any way to do what music's doing in your work. Yeah, I was taken to music lessons at very, very young. We kids sat on one side of a panel door with our sandpaper and our bells, and on the other side were the older kids who were actually playing music. And I wondered what was that, and I've got an idea what music is. And then as life has gone on and I studied the piano, let's say unconventionally, I did reach a point where I think I reached music or the capacity to make music. But I think what's being said here is the music of Richard is going to happen in his artwork not in the instrument, but I also tried singing during COVID because of the lungs. And I actually sang a Mozart song in German with a company man. And it was really astonishing experience because the beauty, I mean, I can make beautiful artworks, I think, but somehow that's that. To sing, to feel this air, your own air come out and be controlled and sing in a foreign language and then control your voice. And with the presence of another person in this combination, I will never forget. I mean, I just to think that we're all, again, the representative thing, we're all capable of doing that. Yeah, wonderful. What are the media influence your work? My answer for that is architecture. For some reason, I've become a patron of architecture. We have a spectacular guest house by Stephen Hall in New Mexico and I'm right now sitting in a incredible campus designed by Robert Frenchurie who did the Sainsbury Wing. Yeah. So-called postmodern architecture. Yes. It's a stretch, but we already mentioned Namjoon Pike and we didn't mention why I like him so much. Yes. Let's go back to him. I'd love to talk about him. The key thing he said and he achieved in his art was the recognition that we, each one of us, is media and that's through that awareness, that cognition, that he could make those fields of TV and all of that, and they're so beautiful and that we are media. I don't know. Maybe somebody could come and say that's a bad thing, but I think not in his case, it's a very beautiful thing to be media. There's an amazing humanity about the work. That's the thing that, you know, it doesn't convert us into the technological beings. It somehow reinforces our humanness, you know. It's extraordinary. Even how he does that. I like an artist, Robert Longo, I don't know if you know his work. Another guest on this book. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Good. Sorry. Not to be name dropping. Hey. No, but he's the kind of artist who really, I don't know, even worship other artists work, you know, and he addresses, and you know, how did they do this? How did they, I tend to be more narrow-minded and critical and so on. Is there a particular discipline in your daily working life that you see as an essential ritual? Well, for some years now, I wake up in the morning, I lie a bed until inspiration strikes, and that will both have a visual component and a verbal component. And then, you know, I have to distinguish from all the false things and so on. But then if the right thing comes along, I'm never sure. I always feel that it's, I just impossible. I can't do that, and it's beyond it. But then I have to try, I think the important part of that is to have decided that paper is actually feminine, and that most of history uses it as a masculine, which is ridiculous. I mean, it's as feminine as feminine can be. And that if you treat it correctly, you'll get superb results. So right now I'm working at a very significant drawing institute to convince them of my ideas. We look forward to seeing the results of that. Thank you. Yeah. Because we think about rituals and obviously lots of rituals happen in the studio and so on. I wanted to ask you about the different studios, and can you tell the difference, if you like, between a main work, a new Mexico work, and a New York work? As in, are you in a different head space, a different bodily space, which means you produce different works in all those places, or is that a very, very oversimplified idea of what an artist does? I know there are some artists who would enjoy or enjoy those kind of outside experiences. I'm not one of them. However, this new install at DIA confronts a body of work made in New Mexico with a body of work made in Maine. The main work looks so main, and the Mexican works look so Mexican that something must happen. Can you articulate what it is about them that makes them that, or is it an unnameable quality? Well, you know, the American West, which has been lauded for its beauty, is through a kind of space, a certain western space. We're fortunate to live on a top of them, Mesa, so we have 360 reviews, and, you know, from there, you walk down the driveway, two steps, and you're just like overwhelmed by this. The only thing you can say is western space. I mean, it's clear, it's big, it's free, it's ideal. It's full of dreams, it's alive. It's just these qualities are so enormous. So like, a lot of art will try to transport a certain quality of light, I mean, the light of Florence, you know, or the light of Los Angeles, you know, like, I mean, look at what is left. I mean, those boxes just transport L.A. light, you know, all over the world. - You like it. - So D.A. Beacon has all natural light and when the light floods in from the ceiling, they just glow. You know, it really does look like Western light. And then the main ones are the very, like a Baroque palette. When I work here, I'll get very high and then go for a walk in the, they're great walking trails here. And I say, I just look for something as beautiful as I just experienced in my studio to calm me down like that. And so it's probably this swinging relationship between work and nature. - You've already given this the answer to this question, but now we can expand on it. So if you could live with just one work of art, what would it be? We know it's the Yan Vanike. Why that extraordinary painting. - Yeah, I've thought of several times, but when I go to the Met with my daughter, who's an artist, a very good artist, by the way. - Yeah, this is Martha Tuttle. - Martha Tuttle, yeah. I hope we'll be on your podcast. - Indeed. - But anyway, we play this game at the Met of saying, you know, what would you like to have, you know, or like, you know, just as if the Met is a shop, you know, exactly like that. And you quickly get over this sort of diminutive size that you would, you know, you could have at home, you know, to, to like these great, huge things. So the adoration of the Mystic Lamb is really huge. And I do not have a house that could hold it, but you couched your question and idealism. - Yes, I would. It's nothing if not an idealistic question. - But he is absolutely the original figure of a chain of great art. But when I actually first saw the adoration of the Mystic Lamb, I came back to the apartment I was staying in, and saw in the library this copy of Pinoffsky's Northern Renaissance painters. And I opened it to Van Eyck. And the first sentence he writes about Van Eyck is, "When you have Van Eyck in your eye, Rubens is just another painter." And that's exactly how I felt, because, you know, you can say, "Why do you like Van Eyck's color? Are you like this?" or that, you know, that's all true, you know, but it's like when it's actually in your eye, you know, when it's like you allow it to get in your eye. Those eyes are so fantastic. He gives the viewer these eyes that they don't have, you know, without his art, you know? I mean, how great is that, you know? And so it's aspirational. - Indeed it is. Thank you. And lastly, what is art for? - My answer, simple answer is the ground, the ground. And we can go a lot of different places there, but I find very comfortable saying that art, real art, I mean, as a species, as a living entity, you know, as the thing that decided to go mobile, back at the very, very beginning, the first thing we did was invent art. And, you know, lately, I know in the world, there's been a lot of attention to health. So people were very happy to say the first thing we invented was the immune system. And the reasoning being is that we couldn't defend ourselves without the immune system. But what I'm saying is you couldn't invent the immune system without having art. So that's where I'm at. Because what is the ground? I mean, you can be convinced so on the street or where you can be convinced of anything. You can be convinced that the ceiling is the ground or whatever, you know? But it's only because we have art that you know what the ground is. Richard, thank you so much. You're very welcome, very welcome. Bless us too. You're audience. Richard Tuttle Half Light is open now and on long-term view at Deer Beacon in the US. Richard Tuttle, small sculptures of the 1970s, is a modern art in Bennett Street in London from the 3rd of September to the 3rd of October. And that's it for this episode. Do subscribe wherever you're listening and give us a rating or a view on Apple podcasts. Please also subscribe to the Art Newspapers' other podcasts that we can art a deep dive into the latest big art world stories, the top shows and the key issues. That's back weekly from September. And subscribe to the Art Newspaper at the Art Newspaper.com, we're on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Blue Sky. Production, editing and sound design on a brush with by David Clack. The producers are Amy Dawson and Alexander Morrison. Thanks also to our designer Daniel Ahathaway. A big thank you to Richard Tuttle. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week for our latest video and audio episode, a brush with Sunil Gupta. Bye for now. 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