RICHARD TUTTLE — New Mexico Silver / Firenze Gold, Galleria Victoria Miro, Florence, 1990

Richard Tuttle, New Mexico Silver / Firenze Gold. Galleria Victoria Miro, Florence, 1990. Exhibition: 16 May–12 June 1990. Four-page folded exhibition announcement; 15.5 × 22 cm folded, 31 × 22 cm unfolded; printed card stock; internally blank as issued.

Original exhibition announcement for Richard Tuttle’s New Mexico Silver / Firenze Gold at Galleria Victoria Miro, Florence. The exhibition subsequently travelled to Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, later in 1990.

Tuttle emerged in the 1960s alongside Post-Minimalism and Process Art, working with deliberately modest materials including paper, cloth, rope and wire. Rather than maintaining clear distinctions between drawing, painting and sculpture, his practice repeatedly moves between them — encompassing drawing, collage, bookmaking, sculpture and design, and a longstanding combination of drawing, weaving, painting and sculpture.

The announcement belongs to that history in miniature. Its broken green linear structure occupies the sheet somewhere between border, drawing, diagram and architecture. Information is dispersed around it rather than organised into a conventional typographic hierarchy. The large areas of unused paper are not neutral: space becomes part of the design.

The more interesting detail is administrative: “a publication will follow the exhibition.” The card announces its own provisional status. It exists before the catalogue, carrying only what was immediately necessary: artist, place, dates, opening, address, telephone numbers and the promise of documentation still to come.

That places it within another history — the paper infrastructure around exhibitions. Invitations, announcements, checklists and catalogues normally occupy different stages of the same institutional sequence. This object belongs to the earliest stage: information sent outward while the exhibition was still present. The exhibition happens. The announcement circulates. The publication follows. The announcement was meant to disappear. It didn’t.

There is another useful layer in its geography. New Mexico Silver / Firenze Gold connects two places in its title; the exhibition itself moved from Florence to Vienna; and the object now survives independently of both. Tuttle’s work was already circulating extensively through European galleries and institutions at this point, including Paris, Düsseldorf, Hannover, Vienna and Florence during 1990 alone.

Condition: Good. Light handling, surface wear and age toning, with minor edge and corner wear and faint marks consistent with an original circulated exhibition announcement. Internally blank as issued.

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