Karl Pfann created Trinity at the 1960 Symposium of European Sculptors at Saint Margarethen Quarry, located in eastern Austria near its border with Hungary. The quarry dates back to the Roman era and is the site of Austria’s oldest sculptors’ guild, founded in 1653. Its limestone is composed of clay and calcareous deposits from petrified algae, corals, and other crustaceous freshwater animals, fragments of which are sometimes embedded in the stone.

Trinity arrived at Storm King in 1961 without a title. In 1993, in response to an inquiry from Storm King, Pfann returned to an earlier working title, Dreieinigkeit, which translates from German to Trinity. Pfann intended the title to resonate “not as much in a sacred sense, much more in a sense concerning the human being and his three parts: body, spirit, and soul.” Trinity is installed in close proximity to some of the other earliest acquisitions in Storm King’s collection, most of which are monolithic stone works carved using traditional sculptural techniques.