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FREDERIC TUTEN

Frederic Tuten has had solo shows of his drawings in East Hampton and a solo show of his paintings at Harper’s Gallery in Manhattan. He has also participated in group shows at galleries in Connecticut, Los Angeles, and Paris, and most recently at Harper’s in East Hampton. His book of drawings, On a Terrace in Tangier, each with a very short story, and with an introduction by the famed international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, was published by Koenig in 2022. Sweet Dreams, a solo exhibition of Tuten’s paintings opened on September 5th, 2024 at Central Fine Gallery, Miami and runs through October 3rd.

 

Tuten has written five novels, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), Van Gogh’s Bad Café (1997) and The Green Hour (2002). He is also the author of one book of inter-related short stories, Self-Portraits: Fictions (2010), The Bar at Twilight (2022) and multiple essays, many of which are about contemporary art. Tuten’s memoir, My Young Life was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019 and his most recent short story, Uncle Umberto’s Orchard, which features silkscreen prints based on his original paintings, was published by Plain Wrapper Press Redux in 2024.

 

Tuten is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, four Pushcart Prizes and one O. Henry Prize.

 

“Frederic Tuten overflows with visionary scenes right out of a fecund and ungovernable imagination. Done in an awkward, assured, cartoonish hand with undertones of Arshile Gorky’s teeming amorphic graphic fields, this is pigment, shape and scene as abstract language.” – Jerry Saltz

 

“Not thinking about anything except the sheer pleasure of making the work, Tuten forges wondrous paths that… inspire us to be just as spirited and creative and capricious as the artist.” – Ida Panicelli, Art Forum

 

“It is a joy looking at Tuten’s new paintings.” – T J Clark

 

“Frederic Tuten’s visual world with its recurring motifs and riotous juxtapositions, is both instantly comprehended but surreally inexplicable. These paintings make you feel that you have just awoken from a fantastic and beautiful dream.” – Hans Ulrich Obrist

 

“Frederic Tuten’s paintings are entirely Tuten-esque, by which I mean joyful. I don’t know how, in these crazy and difficult times, he manages to summon so much inner festiveness.” – Deborah Solomon

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