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<New York City><Uptown><Anne Truitt at Danese>
Anne Truitt at Danese
Danese
41 East 57th Street,
Fuller Building
New York NY 10022
February 16-March 17, 2001
DAVID COHEN:
" Anne Truitt is better known as a sculptor,
if not indeed as the author of “inspirational”, somewhat earnest artist-journals
with titles like “Daybook” and “Prospect”. Danese are in fact presenting the octogenerian abstract
artist’s her first solo painting show in New York, mostly pieces from the
1980s and 1990s, but with a group of works on paper from the 1960s-1980s in
the back gallery. The
paintings are minimal, but unfettered it seems to me by the rhetoric of
Minimalism with a capital “M”.
Tellingly, her associations are with post-painterly abstraction-
Noland and Greenberg were both acknowledged influences, and the most
expressive of the canvases recalls Newman, Frankenthaler and Olitski in the
incrementality of the dramatized, isolated line. A more typical work, like Envoi 1989, places a hard-edged
geometrically irregular, approximately rectangular shape in a bright purple
against a canvas of related but darker hue. Some of the later canvases are stretched on rounded
frames, creating three-dimensional interest at the point where the shapes negotiate
this dip. (I was unconvinced
by the gallery assistant who explained this in terms of economic expediency.)
Aesthetically, all is in the
placement of this shape. The
works are exquisitely refined and restrained without the slightest hint of
feyness. Indeed, they are at
once understated and emphatic.
My favorite of this group had me thinking of a Joseph Albers
repainted by Paul Klee."
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