Anne Truitt

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Anne Truitt ’62–’63. The exhibition includes four sculptures and four paintings on paper from 1962 and 1963 — seminal years for the artist.

Truitt’s first one-person exhibition opened in New York in February 1963, and the eight objects featured here show a vision as original and advanced as that of any of her contemporaries. Each sculpture began with a wooden form constructed by a cabinetmaker to the artist’s specifications. Truitt then finished the artwork through a labor-intensive process involving many layers of paint, each mixed and applied by hand and sanded to a fine finish. The four sculptures exhibited here employ a palette of whites and subtly hued blacks.

Drawing was a daily ritual for Truitt. The stark forms in these four paintings on paper, made over a two-month period in 1962, anticipate the radically new approach to form, color, and scale that would take root in the ensuing decade under the label Minimalism.

Anne Truitt (1921-2004) was born in Baltimore and spent the majority of her life in Washington, DC. Her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1973); the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1974); and the Baltimore Museum of Art (1974 & 1992). In 2009 the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, organized a comprehensive survey of her work. The three volumes of the artist’s acclaimed journals, Daybook (1982), Turn (1987), and Prospect (1996), were published together for the first time as an e-book in 2013, alongside a new print edition of Daybook.