ART-PREVIEW: Martin Puryear

Over the last five decades Martin Puryear has created a body of work based on abstract organic forms rich with psychological, cultural, and historical references. His labor-intensive sculptures are made by hand and combine practices adapted from many different traditions, including wood carving, joinery, and boat building, as well as more recent technology.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive

As a student, Martin Puryear studied ornithology, falconry, and archery, and in the 1960s he volunteered with the Peace Corps in west Africa, where he educated himself in the region’s indigenous crafts. Since then he has continued to travel extensively, observing a range of cultures and their unique approaches to object making. “I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated,” he has said. “It gives me pleasure to feel there’s a level that doesn’t require knowledge of or immersion in the aesthetic of a given time or place”. Martin Puryear’s solo exhibition at Matthew Marks includes eight sculptures made in the past three years, all of which are being shown in New York for the first time.  “Tabernacle” (2019), more than six fe183 cm tall, resembles a cap of the kind worn by soldiers in the USA Civil War. Through openings in its steel-and-fabric construction one can see its interior, which houses a depiction in wood of a Civil War cannon, its barrel holding a cannonball-size mirrored sphere. The bulging latticework shape of “Aso Oke” (2019) is modeled on a different kind of headwear, a Nigerian hat made from traditional handwoven cloth. After sketching the form, Puryear built a 213 cmtall pattern in rattan and twine, which he then cast in bronze. Similarly, the bronze sculpture “Happy Jack” (1993/2011/2020) began as a large vessel made from tightly woven willow stems. Five feet tall, its shape evokes a monumental human chest and shoulders with a headless neck, which is stopped up with a large cork. In the wall-mounted “Hibernian Testosterone” (2018), a cruciform of American cypress supports an animal skull sprouting enormous antlers, which Puryear has cast in aluminum and painted white. They belong to the Irish elk, an extinct animal once common across Ice Age Europe, whose antlers were the largest of any known deer species. The pair in the sculpture, which Puryear has reproduced at actual size, span almost twelve feet. They are a magnificent form but also, as the title implies, an absurd display of masculinity, one that biologists say contributed to the species’ demise. Puryear was the US representative for the 2019 Venice Biennale, and several of the sculptures in this exhibition were first shown in the United States Pavilion there. The base of “A Column for Sally Hemings” (2019) is fluted like the Pavilion’s Doric columns, which, like its domed rotunda, were directly modeled on Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical mansion at Monticello, his Virginia estate, where Sally Hemings was a slave. Carved in white marble, the sculpture’s base tapers at its top like the waist of a skirt. Set into the marble is a cast-iron stake culminating in a ring, a form that first appeared in Puryear’s work in the 2014 sculpture “Shackled” and again two years later in his monumental outdoor sculpture “Big Bling”, installed in Madison Square Park in New York.

Photo: Martin Puryear, Aso Oke, 2019. Bronze, 213 x 259 x 189 cm, © Martin Puryear, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 12/11-19/12/2020, Days & Hours: Open by appointment (to make an appointment, please click here), www.matthewmarks.com