Harper’s is pleased to announce Memory in Fragments, New York-based artist and writer Frederic Tuten’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features Tuten’s new paintings on canvas and opens April 19, 3–6pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Much like his writing, Tuten’s visual work foregrounds assemblage, fragmented forms, and vivid color, where imagery collides in a dialogue of abstraction and narrative suggestion. His novels, short stories, and essays unravel like intricate collages—sampling and reanimating history and myth. He has left an indelible mark on the history of experimental American fiction with his imagist style and nonlinear structures. Seminal works like The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971) and Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993) teem with figurative language—all reflected in his studio practice.
Paintings like El Sombrero Escapado hum with energy, their fractured compositions a collision of ideographs, objects, and heads that seem to whisper secrets from a half-remembered dream. A kaleidoscope of primary colors bursts across the work—vivid blues pressing against feverish reds, while black fissures crack through the tableau like fault lines in memory. A red hat, a green vessel, an inky silhouette—their interaction beckons yet refuses resolution, existing in an intermediary space between abstraction and figuration.
Avant la révolution also brims with restless movement. Here, Tuten partitions the canvas with narrative scenes that seem to draw from life. In a Matisse-inspired green room, a bouquet of flowers juts from a vase, their whimsical buds reaching for an avalanche of floating shapes high above. These amorphous forms appear watchful as they drift like wavering clouds. The artist carves out each vignette with jagged lines and impassioned strokes, creating a composition that ebbs and flows with dynamic, bustling energy.
Ultimately, Tuten’s latest body of work, Memory in Fragments, lingers between remembrance and invention, where hints of the tangible world live in a fantastical dream. His paintings, like his fiction, embrace contradiction—order and chaos, precision and abandon, the familiar and the yet-to-be-seen.
Frederic Tuten (b. 1936, Bronx, NY) is a celebrated novelist, essayist, and visual artist. He studied at the Art Students League, City College of New York, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico prior to receiving a PhD in 19th-century American literature from New York University. Tuten’s visual art has been the subject of solo exhibitions: Sweet Dreams, Central Fine, Miami Beach (2024); Victory, Central Fine, Miami Beach (2022); In the Fullness of Life, Harper’s Apartment, New York (2022); Works on Cardboard, Harper’s, East Hampton, NY (2021); and Flowers, Plants, and Other Romances, Planthouse Gallery, New York (2019). On a Terrace in Tangier—Works on Cardboard, a book of Tuten’s drawings and short stories, was published in 2022 by König Books and KMEC Books, with an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Over the course of Tuten’s long literary career, he published five novels and three books of short stories, including Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988); The Bar at Twilight (2022); The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), and Tintin in the New World: A Romance (1993), both of which feature original cover art designed by Roy Lichtenstein; and recently, a memoir, My Young Life (2019). His short-form writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Artforum, New York Times, and Vogue. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, four Pushcart Prizes, and an O’Henry Prize. Tuten lives and works in New York City and Southampton, NY.