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"I was never interested in making cool, distilled, pure objects."

-Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear was born in 1941 in Washington, DC, and was educated at Catholic University in Washington, the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and Yale University. His first one-person exhibition was in 1968, and since then he has exhibited throughout the world, including public commissions in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He represented the United States at the 1989 Bienal de São Paulo, where he was awarded the festival’s Grand Prize, and his work was featured in Documenta 9 in 1992. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a survey of his work, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2015 the Art Institute of Chicago organized an exhibition of fifty years of his works on paper, which traveled to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Puryear received a MacArthur Foundation award in

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Martin Puryear

One of the most important American sculptors working today, Martin Puryear (born 1941) is known for refined, handmade constructions, primarily in wood. Puryear's abstract forms, while evocative and familiar, elude specific or singular interpretations. In his work, motifs such as the Phrygian cap, human heads, and vessels take on symbolic resonance, functioning as meditations on powerful universal concepts like freedom and shelter, even as they are distilled by the artist into essential forms.

Puryear studied painting at Catholic University in Washington, DC, then spent two years in Africa with the Peace Corps (1964--66), teaching in a village in Sierra Leone. There, he made meticulously detailed drawings, recording local houses, plants, and animals, as well as the people around him. He also experimented with woodcuts; the surface texture of the block in these works prefigures his later sculptures in wood. Many forms and motifs that emerged from these early experiments recur and evolve throughout his career.

From 1966 to 1968, Puryear studied printmaking at

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Martin Puryear 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 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. Puryear’s objects and public installations are a marriage of minimalist logic with traditional ways of making. A common form that occurs in Puryear’s work, the thick-looking stone bulge, is surprisingly hollow, coloring the otherwise sturdy shape with qualities of uncertainty, emptiness, and loss.

Puryear’s work is widely exhibited and collected both in the United States and internationally. A 30-year survey