Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculpture by Anne Truitt at his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. Sixteen of Truitt’s sculptures, made between 1962 and 2004, will be on view, making this the most comprehensive exhibition of Truitt’s work in New York in almost 20 years. A number of works in the exhibition were included in the Hirshhorn Museum’s acclaimed retrospective this past fall in Washington, D.C., which did not travel.

In 1961, Truitt made the first of the totem-like painted wood sculptures that would occupy her for the rest of her life. Truitt believed that life experiences were “the ground out of which art grows.” Sculptures could be triggered by colors she associated with friends or nature or memories of her childhood. She infused her art with these experiences through a labor intensive process—applying many layers of paint by hand to each piece and sanding the surfaces to a fine finish—and the bands of rich color that cover her sculptures, liberated from the traditional two-dimensional plane of painting, prompt viewers to make their own associations with her work. Although critics have attempted to group Truitt with the Minimalist sculptors or the Color Field painters, her marriage of painting and sculpture resulted in an oeuvre that eludes simple categorization.

The works on view range from, White: Five, 1962, made the year before her first one-person exhibition in New York, to Return, 2004, which Truitt completed shortly before she died at age eighty-three. Seen together, the sculptures in the exhibition should offer an introduction to Truitt’s work and provide a sense of her unique artistic achievement.

Anne Truitt (1921-2004) was born in Baltimore and lived the majority of her life in Washington, D.C. 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, D.C. (1974); the Baltimore Museum of Art (1974 & 1992); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2009). Three volumes of her widely renowned memoirs, Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996) have been published.