Martin Puryear
With a minimalist’s eye and a craftsman’s training, the American artist Martin Puryear (b. 1941) is renowned for his poignant studies of form across various mediums, moving from print to sculpture and back with a poetic tact.
Unlike many sculptors who began making work in the 1960s, Puryear uses traditional handicraft methods rather than industrial fabrication to make sculptures that refer to specific objects, from ships, to carts, to caps. These objects, like the phyrgian cap below, recur across his decades-long career in works ranging in size, form, and medium. In each case, the objects are remarkable both for their historical or symbolic meaning and their fundamental simplicity.
Left: Louis Darcis and Louis Simon Boizot, Print of a Free Man, 1794. Engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie. Right: Martin Puryear, Big Phrygian, 2010–2014. Painted red cedar.
58 x 40 x 76 inches. Glenstone Museum, Potomac Maryland.
In the 2022 print, Untitled, Puryear is using a new technique to represent a phrygian cap, a motif that he has been working with since 2010. The jaunty form alludes to the red cap worn by French revolutionaries, which ultimately became a symbol of liberty. In 2014, while working on a sculpture of the cap, Puryear found another, more personal, reference for the work: a Louis Darcis print of a formerly enslaved citizen wearing the cap during the year that France abolished slavery.
Martin Puryear
Untitled, 2022
Intaglio on Arches En Tout Cas paper
28 3/4 x 29 1/2 in.
Edition of 39
If you look closely at this print, you’ll notice that the white lines of Puryear’s cage-like form are offset from the background by a darker hue of gray. This shadowy and rippling contour was produced by an intaglio “open-bite” printing technique that Puryear has recently been experimenting with at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). When using an “open-bite” technique, Puryear exposes a larger swath of the ground-plate to acid, creating these irregular lines where the ink has pooled on the edges of the etching against the otherwise mottled background.
Puryear’s training as a craftsman shows subtly here, as the nature of the technique is not overly manipulated or limited in service of an image. It evidences a respect for the materials he works with, testing the structure and underlying ideas of recurrent visual motif across varying mediums.
Recalling the ribs of a ship’s hull—and his initial training as a ship-builder—Puryear’s prints translate the hidden internal structures of his sculptures into two-dimensions. Rather than merely reproducing other works in a picture, he “tries to make work about the ideas” of the sculptures and their three-dimensional forms.
Puryear’s works are widely collected and celebrated; he earned the National Medal of Arts in 2011 and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2019.
This February, we will be visiting Puryear's solo exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles with a group of Ronnen Fine Art clients during a three-day art tour.
Martin Puryear, Swallowed Sun (Monstrance and Volute), 2019. U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2019.
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