“Walking on air, C10” (2009). Image © Richard Tuttle, courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London and Pace Gallery, New York.

American artist Richard Tuttle’s largest UK project opened this week, featuring an exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery.

The exhibition, entitled “I Don’t Know, Or The Weave Of Textile Language”, invites the audience to explore 50 years of Tuttle’s work.

Spread across three rooms, the exhibition opened on Tuesday, October 14 and focuses on Tuttle’s fascination with textiles.

The exhibition features a number of works combining sculpture, painting and poetry. Through this amalgamation of media, Tuttle wants to explore the relationship between textiles and language and has united his poetry with each piece of artwork.

Tuttle makes use of every inch of the gallery space, most notably the floor. Beside one of the artists’ works laid out on the wooden floor of the final exhibition room, a quote from Tuttle reads: “Why can’t the floor be used for drawing?”

“Fiction fish, 1, 7” (1992). Image © Richard Tuttle, courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London and Pace Gallery, New York.

Larissa Oliveira, 21, a student at King’s College, said: “I was really keen to see an exhibition centred around textiles. I studied it in school and it’s not something you see a lot. I think the combination of language and art is performed extremely creatively.”

Richard Tuttle is a postminimalist artist who came to prominence in the 1960s. He is most widely recognised for his innovative use of materials and his investigations of language, space and scale.

Alongside this exhibition, the Tate Modern is displaying Tuttle’s largest ever sculpture, measuring over 12 metres in height. The sculpture, made mostly of fabric, will hang from the ceiling in the gallery’s Turbine Hall.

“I Don’t Know, Or The Weave Of Textile Language” at The Whitechapel Gallery will run until December 14 and is free to view. Tuttle’s new book, published as part of the project, is available to purchase in the gallery’s shop.