Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear began his career in the late 1960s alongside other members of the postminimalist generation. He explored a variety of media—including painting, drawing, and printmaking—before devoting himself to sculpture. As a sculptor he has maintained an unwavering commitment to traditional building methods, working primarily in wood, but also utilizing an array of other materials, including wire mesh, tar, stone, stainless steel, and bronze. Puryear’s work is further characterized by the artist’s reliance on his own hand to create his sculptures, and by his insistence on mastering his materials—often through preparatory drawings and maquettes—and dexterously translating this understanding to individual works.

Throughout Puryear’s life, a passion for diverse cultures and histories has led him to travel, study, and work in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. These explorations have permitted him to observe the material cultures of many societies around the globe, as well as the skills and trades employed there, and to make connections among disparate cultural traditions. As a result, Puryear’s work is quiet but deliberately associative, encompassing his wide-reaching cultural and intellectual experiences and drawing on a varied reserve of images, ideas, and information.

Puryear's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the National Gallery of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2012, he was the recipient of a National Medal of Arts and Humanities.