Richard Dean Tuttle (Rahway, New Jersey, born 1941) is an American artist regarded as a key figure of postminimalism. His small, casual, subtle and intimate works span sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, artist's books, installation and furniture, with scale and line at the center of his practice.
After studying art, philosophy and literature at Trinity College in Hartford from 1959 to 1963, he moved to New York, where he worked at the Betty Parsons Gallery, which gave him his first show in 1965. His reputation was established in Europe first, which embraced his minimalist work quickly, while acceptance in the United States was slower.
His early pieces were small monochrome reliefs, followed by paper cubes with cut-out designs and shaped wooden reliefs. From the mid-1960s he made eccentrically shaped painted reliefs, galvanized tin ideograms and unstretched canvases dyed in unusual colors. His works on paper are considered seminal in American art. A 1975 survey at the Whitney Museum drew controversy after a harsh review by critic Hilton Kramer.
In the early 1980s he produced the Loose Leaf Notebook Drawings, watercolor suites made on cheap notebook paper, and in 2004 he installed Splash, a mural of colored glass and ceramic tile in Miami Beach. His influence extends to a younger generation that has taken up the casualism he pioneered.