ANNE TRUITT: WATERLEAF
MATTHEW MARKS is pleased to announce Anne Truitt: Waterleaf. The exhibition includes a series of twelve paintings on handmade paper entitled Waterleaf that will be exhibited for the first time, along with three sculptures made between 1983 and 2003.
through April 18, 2026
Truitt’s Waterleaf works, made in 2003, are among the final works on paper the artist made before her death at the age of eighty-three. Truitt described waking one morning with the sudden impression that her sense of shape, structure, and proportion had departed her: “I was left with sound and reception and out of them alone made…Waterleaf.” In each Waterleaf work, subtle variations in color create vertical or horizontal lines, dividing each sheet into halves or quadrants. The compositions recall Truitt’s lifelong preoccupation with delineating space. As she wrote in 1974, “This dependence on placement is ingrained in me. I pay attention to latitude and longitude. It’s as if the outside world has to match some personal horizontal and vertical axis. I have to line up with it in order to be comfortable.”
Three of Truitt’s well-known totemic sculptures are on view, each over six feet tall and made with a labor-intensive process she first developed in the late 1960s in which she would apply up to forty layers of paint by hand, every layer sanded to a fine finish. At the bottom, each sculpture has a thin band of contrasting color. “What I’m trying to do is lift the color up and set it free in three dimensions, and I have spent my whole life trying to do it,” Truitt described. “I’m trying to move it out into space so the color, magnetized to the line of gravity from the sky down to the ground—just as we are—becomes flesh, it becomes human, it becomes emotion, it becomes alive, and it vibrates. I don’t let it be quiet, except for the line underneath that I’m anchoring it on.”
Anne Truitt (1921–2004) lived and worked in Washington, DC, for most of her life. The first museum retrospective of her work was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. A posthumous survey was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 2009. In March, the first European retrospective of Truitt’s work will open at the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. The exhibition will travel to the Musée de Grenoble in France and then to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Truitt published three volumes of her journals: Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996). A previously unpublished fourth volume, titled Yield, and an anthology of other selected writings, titled Always Reaching, were published by Yale University Press in 2022 and 2023, respectively.