Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Anne Truitt: White Paintings, the next exhibition in his gallery at 1062 North Orange Grove in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes seven paintings from the estate of the artist made between 1973 and 1999.
Truitt began a series of white paintings in 1973, which she titled Arundel after the county in Maryland, near where she grew up. Each painting consists of a rectangular canvas covered with a uniformly painted white ground on which the artist sparingly applied a few crisp graphite lines and occasionally some additional strokes of pure titanium white. The variations in the composition and different proportions of the canvases fascinated Truitt, who despite, or perhaps because of, the vastly reduced vocabulary, continued working on the Arundel series on and off for more than 25 years.
This exhibition is the first to solely focus on this singular body of work since 1975, when the Baltimore Museum of Art organized “Anne Truitt: White Paintings,” from which the current show takes its title. The original exhibition caused a scandal and inspired a local critic to write a series of articles denouncing Truitt’s work and calling for the museum’s public funding to be revoked.
Writing in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, Truitt described her complex intentions and the deep emotional life she felt were represented in these seemingly simple works:
“In these paintings I set forth, to see for myself how they appear, what might be called the tips of my conceptual icebergs in that I put down so little of all that they refer to. I try in them to show forth the forces I feel to be a reality behind, and more interesting than, phenomena. I keep trying to catch the laws I can feel illustrated in phenomena: in meetings and just-not-meetings; in forces abutting, thrusting one against another, illuminating one another. A force is only visible in its effect, and it is the split second in which this effect becomes just barely visible that haunts me.”
Aside from three years spent in Japan between 1964 and 1967, Anne Truitt (1921–2004) lived and worked in Washington, DC, for most of her life. Walter Hopps organized the first retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973, and in 2009 the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington organized the first posthumous survey of her work. In 2013 the three volumes of her acclaimed journals, Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996), were republished. A previously unpublished fourth volume of Truitt’s journals titled Yield will be published by Yale University Press in April 2022. The first one-person European museum exhibition of Truitt’s work opens at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in April 2024 and will travel to K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.
