Anne Truitt at Danese - New York - installation sculpture exhibition

Art in America, July, 2003 by Lance Esplund

The superb installation of Anne Truitt's recent sculptures transformed Danese into a sanctuary. Rarely have I seen a gallery exhibition as perfect in pitch and placement; and never have I seen Danese's space as fully realized as it was peopled by Truitt's gorgeous columns of color.

For each of the 13 sculptures--all human in scale and familial in feel--Truitt, as she has done for decades, began with a wood column (the majority on view were 8 inches square and 5 to 7 feet tall) and layered it with numerous acrylic washes. Most of the pieces are monochrome but some are striped vertically, and each appears to be lifted slightly off the floor because of an inset reveal of a different color. Their balletic elevation makes the sculptures appear to be weightless, as if they were about to ascend, to alight gently' or to skim across the floor. Dispersed within the gallery's two rooms, seemingly in groups, pairs or alone, they appeared to mingle with one another and with viewers.

Truitt's sculptures read, paradoxically, not as colored supports but as solid color vibrations of various chords and densities, sounding against one another. Equally classical and modern, totemic and toylike, architectural and natural in feel, Truitt's colored forms evoke a staggering array of associations. Pond Sound (1999), a surprisingly buoyant blue-green (roughly 18 inches square and one of the show's two sculpted cubes), feels like water transformed through Neoplasticism. The red and black Twining Court I (2001), deep and rich like lacquerware, is as dignified as a sentry, sudden as an electric shock. Its De Stijl stripes incise the shaftlike fluting.

Cambria (2002), a deep maroon, is secretive, reticent. Its color has the softness of sleep. The shorter and serene, ivy-tinted Early (2001) evokes the small hollows of a woman's body, cloudless summer skies, whispered yawns. Kiyomizu (2001), a bright alizarin, is youthful, sanguine and lusty. View (1999), striped in white, robin's-egg blue, kelly green and cream, is cool, sharp and clear, heraldic in feel, like a flag for early spring.

This beautiful show, in which each work revealed and extended the range of its neighbor, had a layered, emphatic power that built exponentially. By comparison, the best works in the gallery, when contemplated alone, felt naked and muted, in need of the group. This exhibition is one you miss once its gone: one you wish a museum would buy en masse and reinstall exactly as it was.