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Lot Essay
Strikingly beautiful and meticulously executed, Martin Puryear’s Fraught belongs to a series of ring-shaped sculptures made by the artist between 1978 and 1995. The artist’s demanding process involves bending, shaping, twisting and fixing various hard and soft woods, even occasionally using the still malleable limbs of young saplings that easily contort into his desired circular shapes. Puryear came to art as a painter and thinks of his wall-mounted sculptural ‘Rings’ in these terms. The wall becomes a support for a drawing made of wood. Fraught’s exquisitely-formed shape occupies the same space on the wall as a painting would. However, instead of the composition being situated at the center, one’s eye is pulled outward towards the periphery of the circle’s edge to admire the surface of the wood that is covered with a richly textured veneer of lichen-like texture that has been applied by hand by the artist. A wooden pin, strategically positioned at the base of the circle along with two recessed red notches that mark two and ten o’clock, interrupts the seamless, sinuous curve, suggesting the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent of Greek and Egyptian lore that eats its own tail in a representation of the cycle of beginnings and endings, life and death. Here, Fraught evokes the work of Eva Hesse who also privileged painting’s marginal feature—the frame—and playfully ignored the medium’s inherent two-dimensionality.
Puryear looks widely at images and objects across place and time as references for his work, including the arts of ancient Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. But these sources are often only evoked rather than represented or abstracted, a quality Puryear deliberately seeks out. As the artist has said, “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” (M. Puryear, “Martin Puryear,” An Eye for an Eye: Focusing on Great Artists and Their Works, Washington, D.C., 2013, p. 174). Equally important to the artist is the process behind the work’s fabrication; he looks to the furniture making, boat building, and wood carving traditions of cultures all over the world in formulating the engineering techniques in his work. It would also be remiss to not cite Modernist sculptors Constantin Brâncuşi and Barbara Hepworth, who both made intricate and exquisite compositions out of wood as sources of inspiration for the artist. Puryear weaves together moments from each of these cultural, technical and artistic traditions to crafts a vision for his sculptures that are uniquely his own.
Puryear himself has said of his relationship to history and place: “I believe that art is created by people, often quirky people who often, I think, put these jogs and switchbacks in the historical continuum that people always want to believe in. There are always convoluted and complicated cul-de-sacs that don’t allow things to be read just as a linear evolution” (M. Puryear, quoted in E. Reede, “Jogs and Switchbacks,” in J. Elderfield, ed., Martin Puryear, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007, pp. 73-97). Elizabeth Reede, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, writes, “We are meant to operate between the oppositions of representation and abstraction, beautiful and ugly, familiar and unknown. These are only a few of the oppositions within which Puryear operates, working in the spaces between philosophical poles—rather than at their extremes—where he finds the most fertile ground for thought and visual challenge. Puryear further complicates our attempts to grasp his work by frustrating the formalist devices commonly used to analyze three-dimensional pieces, such as the perceptual binaries of open/closed, dark/light, interior/exterior, and live/volume, and in so doing, he mentally liberates the viewer from such familiar approached. His sculpture explores the formal and intellectual interval between these dualities, engaging aspects of each endpoint without settling on either one, and this intense, almost imperceptible negotiation of aesthetic, theoretical, and spiritual vastness within such oppositions is what makes the work at once difficult and profound” (E. Reede, ibid.).
On the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at MoMA, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, wrote of the artist’s work, “Mr. Puryear is a formalist in a time when that is something of a dirty word, although his formalism, like most of the 1970s variety, is messed with, irreverent and personal. His formalism taps into a legacy even larger than race: the history of objects, both utilitarian and not, and their making. From this all else follows, namely human history, race included, along with issues of craft, ritual, approaches to nature and all kinds of ethnic traditions and identities. These references seep out of his highly allusive, often poetic forms in waves, evoking the earlier Modernism of Brâncuși, Arp, Noguchi and Duchamp, but also carpentry, basket weaving, African sculpture and the building of shelter and ships. His work slows you down and makes you consider its every detail as physical fact, artistic choice and purveyor of meaning” (R. Smith, “Humanity’s Descent, In Three Dimensions,” New York Times, November 2, 2007).
Puryear looks widely at images and objects across place and time as references for his work, including the arts of ancient Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. But these sources are often only evoked rather than represented or abstracted, a quality Puryear deliberately seeks out. As the artist has said, “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” (M. Puryear, “Martin Puryear,” An Eye for an Eye: Focusing on Great Artists and Their Works, Washington, D.C., 2013, p. 174). Equally important to the artist is the process behind the work’s fabrication; he looks to the furniture making, boat building, and wood carving traditions of cultures all over the world in formulating the engineering techniques in his work. It would also be remiss to not cite Modernist sculptors Constantin Brâncuşi and Barbara Hepworth, who both made intricate and exquisite compositions out of wood as sources of inspiration for the artist. Puryear weaves together moments from each of these cultural, technical and artistic traditions to crafts a vision for his sculptures that are uniquely his own.
Puryear himself has said of his relationship to history and place: “I believe that art is created by people, often quirky people who often, I think, put these jogs and switchbacks in the historical continuum that people always want to believe in. There are always convoluted and complicated cul-de-sacs that don’t allow things to be read just as a linear evolution” (M. Puryear, quoted in E. Reede, “Jogs and Switchbacks,” in J. Elderfield, ed., Martin Puryear, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007, pp. 73-97). Elizabeth Reede, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, writes, “We are meant to operate between the oppositions of representation and abstraction, beautiful and ugly, familiar and unknown. These are only a few of the oppositions within which Puryear operates, working in the spaces between philosophical poles—rather than at their extremes—where he finds the most fertile ground for thought and visual challenge. Puryear further complicates our attempts to grasp his work by frustrating the formalist devices commonly used to analyze three-dimensional pieces, such as the perceptual binaries of open/closed, dark/light, interior/exterior, and live/volume, and in so doing, he mentally liberates the viewer from such familiar approached. His sculpture explores the formal and intellectual interval between these dualities, engaging aspects of each endpoint without settling on either one, and this intense, almost imperceptible negotiation of aesthetic, theoretical, and spiritual vastness within such oppositions is what makes the work at once difficult and profound” (E. Reede, ibid.).
On the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at MoMA, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, wrote of the artist’s work, “Mr. Puryear is a formalist in a time when that is something of a dirty word, although his formalism, like most of the 1970s variety, is messed with, irreverent and personal. His formalism taps into a legacy even larger than race: the history of objects, both utilitarian and not, and their making. From this all else follows, namely human history, race included, along with issues of craft, ritual, approaches to nature and all kinds of ethnic traditions and identities. These references seep out of his highly allusive, often poetic forms in waves, evoking the earlier Modernism of Brâncuși, Arp, Noguchi and Duchamp, but also carpentry, basket weaving, African sculpture and the building of shelter and ships. His work slows you down and makes you consider its every detail as physical fact, artistic choice and purveyor of meaning” (R. Smith, “Humanity’s Descent, In Three Dimensions,” New York Times, November 2, 2007).