There have been a number of recent Martin Puryear exhibitions: a 2007 sculpture show at the Museum of Modern Art, a 2015 exhibition of his works on paper at the Morgan Library and a 2023 exhibition of his site-specific works at Storm King. These covered parts of his entire work. “Nexus,” which includes more than 50 pieces and is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is the first piece to accommodate its collection in some time, and it does so very well.
Puryear’s devotion to craftsmanship—in his earlier decades a bold reaction to industrial minimalism—is no longer an attitude as rare as it was when he started out. It’s also clear that it wasn’t any kind of temporary reaction. It has continued to do so ever since, but in flexible and varied directions. The chronology alone has provided a new context for considering both old objects (some rarely seen items from Puryear’s personal collection) and new objects (multiple pieces from the past decade), which is only the beginning of the merits of this retrospective, developed in consultation with the 84-year-old artist.
Puryear piece, 1979 Relationship Playing an excellent synchronous role here is an Alaskan cedar ring that bends slightly and meets with each end painted black and white. There are no perfect circles in this world; This one depicts that fact. Alignment is rarely perfect but it does happen. It is one of several existing episodes or partial episodes; Night and day It is roughly a semicircle suspended by wire, a frustrated arch roughly divided into two halves in black and white. It is imperfect and striking.
Puryear’s workshops are very evident in the exceptionally open arrangement of the works in the show – the arrangement makes simple resonances and connections across the gallery’s wide spaces. The catalog notes that Puryear often viewed his career as a carousel, something more complex than any ring, but guaranteed returns. Cleveland Special Alien gatheringsticking balls of pine and cedar, both like a Fibonacci spiral and something like a gastropod, which we know isn’t necessarily an oxymoron, but it’s questionable here. The vital attraction was the cold molding in their manufacture, a technique often used in boat building, taking advantage of the natural plasticity of the wood. self It is another work consisting of mahogany and red cedar casting; It looks like a dark stone until one takes a closer look at it, and that self seems a little less mysterious.
Puryear is a woodworker in D.C. W. He sometimes carved wood, but it was this natural escape for most wood carvers that he ventured beyond; Wood clumping is its most common role. The results do not look like those of Nevelson or others with similar habits; they tend to exploit the potential of wood, which is not quite alive but retains, as he has often demonstrated, vibrant interactive qualities. “It’s shrinking and swelling all the time.” Sometimes he grinds the wood in traditional ways, sometimes he simply uses a branch. Some of his most exciting works combine these elements, finding drama in carpentry. havencreated in the wake of a disastrous studio fire, features an unassuming pine trunk atop two branches of tall natural shrubs linked by a wheel. There is something ironic but also true about ownership, and the kinetic qualities of the work stem from much more than the wheel.
The exhibition and its catalog take a comprehensive look at the major influences in Puryear’s life, from his geographical and intellectual wanderings. His time in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, art school in Stockholm and teaching at Fisk University in Nashville introduced new methods and ideas into his practice, yet the technique often does not reflect the subject matter. He learned carpentry in Sierra Leone and processed his raw hides himself in Nashville. These methods were applied to all sorts of different uses as a torrent of new ideas covered them over time. His interest in basket weaving originated in Africa, and many of his works feature similar webs, but they have had a major theoretical influence elsewhere. The catalog notes that Purer recovered three volumes of drawings by Paolo Uccello to help explain the practice.
He uses the enclosed space a lot to achieve completely different goals. maquette l Big blinginstalled in Madison Square Park in 2016, first suggests a fictional fox made of laminated plywood, but criticism emerges upon closer inspection. It couldn’t be entered, but it was wrapped in a chain link fence to make it more visible. Puryear wrote: “I see how it grows, divides, and stratifies. I see how it gestures and threatens (and also how it excludes).”
Puryear’s works contain substantial social commentary, but his style is not trumpet. CFAO It’s an intricate work: an unpainted pine frame surrounding a painted pine face-like structure, all placed on a found wheelbarrow. It sounds rather cheerful until it turns out that the title refers to the French Company of West Africa, a tradition trapped in a cage of exploitation. Column by Sally Hemings It is an elegant work, yet the skirt-like marble base serves as a base for a cast-iron tie-post, a brutal (and worse) use to which Hemings was put.
His commentary is often more nuanced than that. Honor him Some lines by Jim Beckworth It is a type of frieze in the dried rawhide of enslaved fur trappers and ranchers. There are a variety of images he returns to; Puryear has always been fascinated by birds (he is a falconer) and they recur in his works. Two, both titled On the tundradepicting falcons, one in white marble, one in dark cast iron. Puryear is emphasized by the diversity of her colors, a kind of contrast to the human construction of race.
one of the pieces, The big PhrygianDepicts the revolutionary Fateha. His form appears elsewhere repeatedly, in sculptures and other drawings. It’s something Puryear does frequently, where he uses a form of a point in one place and then uses it to more skewed ends elsewhere. Nairi Baghramyan brilliantly writes in the exhibition catalog of his “distinct and universal visual language in which references remain mere allusions; this allows them to evade the burden of ultimate meaning, and embrace the possibility of multiple interpretations.” Articles in the catalog are released from the linked page frequently; One welcome curatorial choice is to quote many of these, from Maya Lin to Kerry James Marshall, in the exhibition’s captions.
There are also early charcoal and ink drawings and woodcuts, many from Puryear’s personal collection, which are rarely exhibited. There are his woodcut illustrations by Jean Toomer cane From 2000. There are more recent works as well. Shell game From 2014, a type of slug-like squiggle made from tulip poplar, also vaguely referring to the Phrygian cap. They were painted with another demotic method aimed at achieving artistic goals: milk paint, which is usually used to finish furniture.
Emily Libert, the Loren Rich Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (who co-curated the exhibition with Reto Turing, head of culture at the Foundation for Art, Culture and History in Winterthur, Switzerland) wrote in the exhibition catalog: “Across these media, there is, in Purer’s words, a ‘quality of shimmer’ in which stable opposites—open and closed, hard and soft, dark and light—appear in a theatrical dynamism that demonstrates art’s ability to reformulate established categories and ideas. Recasting is possible in all combinations that can Imagine it in the galleries of Cleveland.
“Martin Puryear: Nexus“On display at the Cleveland Museum of Art until August 9, 2026.
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