Martin Puryear

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of eight new sculptures by Martin Puryear in his galleries at 502 & 522 West 22nd Street. This will be the artist’s first one-person exhibition with the gallery.

Puryear’s abstract organic forms are rich with psychological and intellectual references that explore issues of race, culture, and history. His new sculptures incorporate a diverse range of materials, from mirrored stainless steel and cast iron to a variety of woods, including red cedar, poplar, holly, ash, and pine. Puryear’s sculptures are made by hand over a long period of time. His techniques, developed over a nearly forty-year career, combine practices adapted from many different cultures, including elements of Asian joinery, African carving, and American boat building, as well as the latest digital technology.

Over the past two years Puryear has created a body of work inspired by a late-nineteenth century engraving that commemorates the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. The engraving shows a man wearing a red hat, called a Phrygian cap, accompanied by the caption “Moi libre aussi” (“I am free too”). The Phrygian cap, which has been a symbol of freedom and emancipation since classical antiquity, became a prominent emblem of the French Revolution and serves as a direct inspiration for several of Puryear’s recent sculptures.

Big Phrygian, a large sculpture made of red cedar painted a vivid red, directly evokes the cap from the engraving, recreating its creases and folds with meticulously applied layers of wood veneer. A wall sculpture, Phrygian Plot, derives it shape from the same cap, tracing its profile with a gently curved silhouette composed of alternating bands of black ebony and white holly. Puryear further explores the formal possibilities of this imagery in Up and Over, cast in ductile iron.

Discussing his work, Puryear has written, “I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them. The ideas that give rise to a work can be quite diffuse, so I would describe my usual working process as a kind of distillation — trying to make coherence out of things that can seem contradictory. But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence.”

Martin Puryear (born 1941) lives and works in upstate New York. His first one-person exhibition opened in 1968. Since then he has had one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Fundación “la Caixa” in Madrid, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and completed public commissions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. In 1989 he represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennial, receiving the festival’s Grand Prize, and in 1992 his work was included in Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a retrospective of his work in 2007, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award and a Presidential Medal of the Arts.