10 January, 1971
1971
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30”

Summer 88, No. 4
1988
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30”

Summer 97, No. 1
1997
Acrylic on paper
22 x 30”

Way I
1974
Acrylic on canvas
40.5 x 64”

"What is important to me is not geometrical shape per se, or color per se, but to make a relationship between shape and color which feels to me like my experience. To make what feels to me like reality."

An influential and prolific American artist, Anne Truitt (1921–2004) was born in Baltimore, and grew up in the coastal Maryland town, Easton. She died in Washington D.C. Originally trained in psychology, Truitt worked as a nurse and research assistant in psychiatry during World War II. Even though she didn’t pick up visual artmaking until the 1950s, she wrote poems and stories in her youth. She studied sculpture at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Dallas Museum of Fine Art in 1949–1950. By the early 1960s, Truitt had become a multifaceted artist fluent in painting, drawing and writing. After experimenting with a wide range of materials and techniques, she also started to produce her now signature sculptures painted in serene, dense colors that complement the shape of the rectangular, wooden structures.

Truitt’s works skillfully combine color and form in their truest essence, examining their connections and spatial characteristics in relation to one another. Her paintings and drawings also draw from this relationship to achieve the highest simplicity with the most meaning, this time on two-dimensional surfaces of paper and canvas. Both her sculptures and paintings reveal to the viewer an abstraction of various figures from Truitt’s own past, feelings and imagination.