Anne TruittPerception and Reflection
Published by GILES in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Release Date — October 2009 (UK and USA)
Dimensions — 176 pages, 280 x 240 mm (9½ x 11 in.), portrait, hardback PLC
Illustrations — Up to 150 colour and 12 b & w illustrations
Hardback price — UK£30.00/US$60.00
ISBN — 1-904832-61-X
ISBN — 978-1-904832-61-4
Book Details (pdf) — Anne-Tuitt-AI-LR.pdf
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Sales Points
Publication accompanies a major exhibition opening at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in October 2009, the first major retrospective exhibition of Anne Truitt’s work in over 30 years
The first complete monograph of the artist, which includes a full survey of 50 of Anne Truitt’s sculptures and over 40 two-dimensional works made during the artist’s 40-year career, up to her death in 2004
Features essays by organizing curator Kristen Hileman and leading scholar James Meyer that interpret Truitt’s career and her place within the broader context of American abstraction
About the Book
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.
