Book Description

Anne Truitt, an artist based in Washington, D.C. for most of her career, remains an under-recognized force in art post-1960, which has been dominated by artists like Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly who have strongly influenced the movement now known as Minimalism. Part of this lack of recognition stems from the fact that Truitt pursued a staunchly independent course in her art: not only did she take a different path from the Color Field artists often associated with Washington, D.C., but she created reduced geometric abstraction that deviated from the approaches of Minimalist artists in some significant ways. For example, her highly nuanced use of colour veered dramatically from primary hues, and the titles of many of her works evoked places and events that were important to her, suggesting a complex network of references beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture. This volume, and the accompanying exhibition, will form an important part of the re-evaluation of Truitt's art, due to the scope of work which it presents. A wide range of three-dimensional works will be presented to showcase Truitt's exploration of colour, scale and proportion. Examples of two-dimensional series on canvas in which the artist investigated the cusp of visibility as well as the relationships between painting and sculpture, join 24 works on paper some of which date to the year that Truitt first arrived at her radical reduction of form, and others that represent a three-year period during the 1960's from which there are almost no extant sculptures. At the heart of this volume are colour plates of the columnar sculptures that became the hallmark of Truitt's profoundly focused practice, and that made her so significant to the development of minimal abstraction. Whilst Truitt's work has featured as part of larger surveys of Minimalism, as well as in Truitt's own artist's journals - Daybook (1984), Turn (1987), and Prospect (1996) - it has never before been the subject of a complete monographic survey. For this reason alone publication of Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection in 2009 will be a major event in itself, and one that will significantly increase our understanding of post-1960's art. AUTHOR: Kristen Hileman the organizing curator of the exhibition, is associate curator, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she recently curated The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms (2008), and has worked with such artists as John Baldessari, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Wolfgang Tillmans; James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and the author of Minimalism: Art & Polemics in the Sixties (Yale, 2001) and Themes & Movements: Minimalism (Phaidon, 2000). He organised the Anne Truitt exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University in 2004. He also co-authored Howard Hodgkin with Nicholas Serota (Tate Britain, 2006) 150 colour & 12 b/w illustrations *