Richard Tuttle and Odili Donald Odita: Language and Pattern

Crown Point Press is pleased to present Richard Tuttle and Odili Donald Odita: Language and Pattern, a two-person exhibition on view until October 30, 2026. Both artists use the visual elements of color, scale, line, pattern, and perception to explore how nonrepresentational forms can communicate—Tuttle through invented signs and intimate material gestures, and Odita through color, pattern, cultural memory, and political forces.

On view is Richard Tuttle’s portfolio Type,2003, consisting of 26 etchings that form an invented alphabet. Rather than representing letters, he explores sequence, signs, and communication. Tuttle is intrigued by the pursuit of new forms; in making an alphabet, he thinks beyond the recognizable letters. “One of my discoveries,” he says, is the “correspondence of letters and numbers.” Tuttle’s concept of an alphabet is essentially one of sequence. He began the project by thinking about process and material: the copper plate, the paper, and the tarlatan cloth used by the printers in the first stage of wiping an etching plate. In this series, Tuttle incorporated the cloth into the actual prints, using the chine colle process. He was searching, he said, for “a new plane of consciousness between the paper and the tarlatan.” Tuttle chose the title of the series Type for the word’s association with printing, but also for its meaning as a model characterizing or foreshadowing other similar things. Tuttle has called the images in this new alphabet “playful.”

Odili Donald Odita uses the juxtaposition and repetition of color and geometry as elements to unify space in his paintings and wall installations. He mixes his own color palette, and tries not to use the same color more than once. Shapes are demarcated by straight lines, triangles are elongated and skewed, chevrons run tangentially across a color field. Odita has said, “For me, the abstract is not something that I can say is unreal … for me, abstraction is a means of getting to the real in the most direct way.”

Three of the four projects completed by Odilia Donald Odita in the spring of 2022 are included in the exhibition: Bliss, Net, Black on Blue and White on Red (Burning). He said at the time that “I have been wanting to understand the spatial relationships that could be found within the structure of the selected patterns.” Odita used the same key plate for the prints Net, Black on Blue and White on Red (Burning): vertical, syncopated lines were drawn using soft ground and printed in black, white, yellow, red, and blue. He used aquatint to create gem-like color fields of blue, magenta, red, and yellow for the backgrounds of Bliss and Black on Blue and White on Red (Burning). Odita said in a recent conversation, “Colors refer to literary and aesthetic suggestions of Black bodies and people of color (purple, blue, and deep red).”