The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is delighted to present the first comprehensive European exhibition of the work of US-American artist and writer Anne Truitt (1921–2004).
With around 120 works spanning more than four decades, the exhibition at K20 honors an artist who has long been recognized in the United States as a pioneer of Minimal Art and is now finally being celebrated in Europe with a major retrospective. On view are Truitt’s groundbreaking sculptures of the early 1960s, her vividly colored works on paper, her white-on-white paintings, and her deep‑black Piths, one of her final series of works. The exhibition thus offers a long‑overdue reexamination of Minimal Art and demonstrates that this artistic movement was not only formally rigorous but, through Truitt’s use of color, also poetic, personal, and sensually perceptible.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition presents Truitt’s ongoing career from 1961 to 2004 in seven chapters and highlights her different approaches to the media of sculpture, painting, and drawing. Special highlights include her early and brightly colored sculptures – Hardcastle (1962), Remembered Sea (1971), Quipe (1984) – which are generously installed in the white galleries of K20. For the first time since the 1960s, Summer Run (1964), one of the metal sculptures Truitt produced in Japan, will be presented publicly again.
In addition, her large-format and elongated paintings, including Echo (1973) and Ojibwa (1993), will be on view. In a separate chapter, Truitt’s Arundel Paintings will be shown; when first presented in 1975 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, they caused an outcry in the press because the white-on-white painting was considered too minimal. Also on view are her Piths, deep‑black canvases in which Truitt processed her reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York. A short film by director Jem Cohen (born 1962), showing Truitt at work in her studio in 1999, introduces the artist personally.
The exhibition is organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Musée de Grenoble, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung.
On the occasion of the artist’s first comprehensive exhibition in Europe, an extensively illustrated catalogue is being published, featuring a text by Truitt herself, selected archival materials, and three insightful essays.
With this exhibition, following our successful presentations of Carmen Herrera in 2018, Charlotte Posenenske in 2020, and Lygia Pape in 2022, we aim to expand the narrative of postwar art to include one of the most influential artists from the United States of America.
Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of the Art Collection
© Text and Photo courtesy of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K20
