Martin puryear
Martin Puryear (1941–) was born and raised in Washington, DC, studied woodworking in Sierra Leone and Stockholm, Sweden, and earned an MFA from Yale University. He is one of the world’s most eminent sculptors and has lived in the Hudson Valley for the past 25 years. Puryear’s work is a product of visibly complex craft construction and manipulation of pure material; its forms are combinations of the organic and the geometric. His process can be described as reductive, seeking to bring work and material close to its original state and creating rationality in each work derived from the maker and act of making. This is what Puryear calls “inevitability,” or a “fullness of being within limits” that defines function. The pure and direct imagistic forms born from his use of traditional craft are allusive and poetic, as well as deeply personal.
Puryear was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1989 MacArthur Foundation Award, and the 2009 Gold Medal in Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2011, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 2019, Puryear represented the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale.
