MARTIN PURYEAR
That skill was not acquired easily. An African American born in Washington, D.C., in 1941, he drew, read, and made things as a child; studied painting at Catholic University in Washington; lived in Sierra Leone and learned carpentry from local workmen; studied printmaking in Stockholm while apprenticed to a master cabinetmaker; and finally studied sculpture as a graduate student at Yale. He has traveled to the Arctic and Japan, and he’s lived in Nashville, New York, and until recently, Chicago.
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It should thus come as no surprise that Puryear’s work eludes easy categorization. Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd were important early influences, yet Puryear avoids Judd’s symmetry and rectilinearity. The influence of traditional crafts is apparent in each work’s careful fabrication, yet his works are in the strict sense “useless” art objects destined for museums and collectors’ galleries. A variety of cultural influences are present, but no one predominates.
The box at the top of Sanctuary represents a common element in Puryear’s work, present in half the pieces in this show–the way his sculptures often enclose or partially enclose space. Many pieces bend wood into hoops, and several large floor works use tar and wire mesh to create an interior that can be glimpsed but not entered. In fact none of these enclosed spaces is available for the viewer to occupy, so they have no practical ritual use; but the viewer is invited to envision these “sanctuaries” as mental resting places, free of the world’s corners and edges and problems, and to enter them in imagination.
If each of Puryear’s works defies expectation, so in his career he has tried to push beyond his own limits. The elegant, smooth sheen of his earlier bent-wood hoops soon gives way to constructions of steel wire organized to form an airy, porous enclosure, and these themselves give way to large works of dark wire mesh covered with irregular splotches of tar–hulking, a bit foreboding, and strangely magical. Similarly his work in wood grows rougher, less finished in its surfaces.
