Stone South, 1974 - 1978

Basel 2018
Stone South

Matthew Marks Gallery

Work on Paper
Acrylic and graphite on paper
76.0 x 56.0 (cm)
29.9 x 22.0 (inch)
The pioneering work of Anne Truitt remains under the radar. Included in the seminal exhibitions ‘Black, White and Grey’ at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1964 and ‘Primary Structures’ at the Jewish Museum in 1966, Truitt is less known than her male contemporaries, although her work was central to the discourse of the time. In her formative years, she was influenced by Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. Her first solo exhibition of Minimalist monoliths at André Emmerich Gallery in New York in February 1963 was nine months before Donald Judd’s first Green Gallery show. She was championed by Clement Greenberg, as well as the legendary curator Walter Hopps, who organized her first museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. Truitt developed her pared-down forms at the same time, yet independent of, such artists as Judd and Robert Morris. Her unique contribution to Minimalism was that she did not try to negate allusion and feeling, but rather attempted, as the artist said in 1987, to get ‘maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.’