Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear is a renowned American sculptor whose work is celebrated for its intricate craftsmanship, thoughtful use of materials and profound exploration of form and identity. Interested in ‘dealing with hands-on work, in the evolution of ideas through doing or making as opposed to more and more finely spun rhetoric’, Puryear is an artist who melds modernist biomorphic forms with minimal means.

Influenced as a young man by his father whose hobby was woodwork, Puryear began using tools in his father’s workshop and by college was crafting acoustic guitars. Working in a variety of media, Puryear trained in the craft of building furniture from Swedish workers while enrolled at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. During two years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, Puryear was inspired by local ebony carvers and woodworkers and enlisted their techniques and forms in his studies of sculpture, receiving his MFA from Yale University in 1971.

Even as many artists in post-war America turned from traditional stone and marble to industrial processes, Puryear worked through minimalist sensibilities by means of natural materials. Puryear prefers carving and joining by hand, honing obdurate materials into flexible shapes, abstract forms that foreground the material and labour of their making, much as Post-Minimalist artists emphasised the process aspect of their creations. Immense talent and skill allowed him to create works of sculpture in which utilitarian craftsmanship could be combined with conceptual and formal rigour.

Puryear’s forms are biomorphic rather than geometric and from that point of view also look back to the organic lines of early Modernists such as Constantin Brâncuşi. Puryear believes that the work speaks for itself and radiates its own identity. He speaks about the beauty inherent in craft that went into the work. The artist’s ideal of carving poetry in forms is exemplified in his 1989 work Untitled, which sold for US$1,805,000 at Christie’s in 2014, a world record price for a work by Puryear achieved at auction.

Puryear’s work has been exhibited in major institutions, including Lookout (2023) at the Storm King Art Center in New York, and are part of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and more.