Image via matthewmarks.com. |
Opening Friday, November 7, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
522 West
22nd Street
New York,
NY
From
Matthew Marks press release:
Matthew
Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of eight new sculptures by Martin
Puryear. This will be the artist’s first one-person exhibition with the
gallery.
Puryear’s
abstract organic forms are rich with psychological and intellectual references
that explore issues of ethnicity, culture, and history. His new sculptures
incorporate a diverse range of materials, from bronze, cast iron, and
mirror-polished stainless steel to a variety of woods, including red cedar,
tulip poplar, maple, holly, Alaskan yellow cedar, walnut, and ebony. Puryear’s
sculptures, typically made by hand with labor-intensive methods, often require
months to complete. His techniques, developed over a forty-year career, combine
practices adapted from many different traditions, including wood carving,
joinery, and boat building, as well as recent digital technology.
The
exhibition includes works inspired by the form of the Phrygian cap, or “liberty
cap,” which was worn as a sign of resistance during the French Revolution and
adopted as a symbol of liberty during the American Revolution. Puryear
explains, “Although I was certainly aware of numerous depictions of this cap in
European and early American art when I began work on the Big Phrygian sculpture,
I only discovered the engraved image of the black man wearing the red Phrygian
cap — the image that appears on the exhibition announcement — years
afterwards.” This engraving is accompanied by the caption “Moi libre aussi” (“I
am free too”) and dates from 1794, the year slavery was first abolished in
France, only to be restored eight years later by Napoleon Bonaparte and finally
abolished permanently in 1848.
Big
Phrygian, a large sculpture made of red cedar painted a vivid red, directly
evokes the cap from the engraving, recreating its creases and folds with
meticulously applied layers of wood veneer. A wall sculpture, Phrygian Plot,
derives it shape from the same cap, tracing its profile with a gently curved
silhouette composed of alternating bands of black ebony and white holly. The
possibilities of this form are further explored in Up and Over, a sculpture
cast in ductile iron.
Martin
Puryear (born 1941) lives and works in upstate New York. His first one-person
exhibition opened in 1968. Since then he has had one-person exhibitions at
numerous museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Fundación “la Caixa”
in Madrid, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the de
Young Museum in San Francisco, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and
the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and he has completed public
commissions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. In 1989 he represented the
United States at the São Paulo Biennial, receiving the festival’s Grand Prize,
and in 1992 his work was included in Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, organized a retrospective of his work in 2007, which
traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. He is the
recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award and a Presidential Medal of the Arts.
No comments:
Post a Comment