Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt was a major figure in American art for more than forty years, with her pioneering, striking use of geometry and color signaling a new direction for modern sculpture. Inspired by personal memories and her surrounding environment, Truitt created vertical, abstract works, often taking the form of totem-like wooden rectangular prisms, elegantly painted and sanded to a pristine finish. The sculptures blur the line between the second and third dimensions with bold pigments which overwhelm the surface. Grounded in minimalist sculpture, Truitt developed a language of abstraction with her evocative, geometric oeuvre, each work delightfully rendered with astonishing color and seemingly floating just above the floor.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921, Truitt studied psychology at Bryn Mawr College before her entrance into artmaking. Six years after graduating, Truitt studied sculpture for one year at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C., followed by three months at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art. Following this formal training, she experimented with various media and techniques, including clay, cast cement and plaster, and steel welding. In 1961, Truitt began to work in the style for which she later became known: painting multiple delicate layers of color characterized by subtle variations onto wooden constructions. Truitt had her first solo exhibition in 1963 at André Emmerich Gallery, where her work would be principally represented for the next three decades. In 2009, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. mounted an acclaimed first posthumous retrospective of her work. Today her estate is represented exclusively by Matthew Marks Gallery, and her work is in the collections of many leading museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.