Мартин Пьюри: Мастерство, Абстракция и Монументальность

American artist (born 1941)

Martin L. Puryear (born May 23, 1941) is an Afro American artist known for his devotion to traditional craft. Working in a variety of media, but primarily wood, his reductive technique and meditative approach challenge the physical and poetic boundaries of his materials. The artist's Liberty/Libertà exhibition represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Born in 1941 in Washington, DC, Martin Puryear began exploring traditional craft methods in his youth, making tools, boats, musical instruments, and furniture. After receiving a BA in Fine Art from the Catholic University of America in 1963, Puryear spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone. From 1966–1968, he studied printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, returning to the United States to enroll in the graduate program for sculpture at Yale University. Although he discovered Minimalism at a formative period in his development, Puryear would ultimately reject its impersonality and formalism. After earning his MFA from Yale, Puryear began teaching at Fisk University in Nashville and University of Maryland in College Park. In 1977, following a devastating fire in his Brooklyn studio, Puryear moved to Chicago and began teaching at the University of Illinois. The Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition in 2007 that traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. His work is widely exhibited and collected both in the United States and internationally. For close to fifty years, Puryear has created works that transpose his distinctive abstract sculptural language to a monumental scale. From his earliest outdoor work at Artpark, in Lewistown, New York, in 1977 to his newly inaugurated 2023 permanent commission for Storm King Art Center, Puryear’s public and site specific sculptures originate with the artist’s hand, whether through drawings or with models that the artist carves or fashions from pieces of wood.

In 2023, Puryear completed Lookout, his first large scale sculpture made of brick, at Storm King Art Center in New York's Hudson Valley. The artwork is a compound curved domed shell, pierced by 90 circular apertures of various sizes. Visitors can walk around and into the sculpture, enjoying the views of the surrounding area. This project had been a structural puzzle until a meeting in 2019 between the artist and MIT professor and structural engineer John Ochsendorf unlocked a solution. Ochesendorf has extensively researched ancient and traditional architectural technologies, particularly masonry vaults and domes. Their meeting resulted in a near instantaneous collaborative scheme that incorporated the principle of Nubian vaulting, an ancient building method with which Ochsendorf and Puryear were both familiar. Engineering services were provided by Silman Associates, Structural Engineers. At Storm King the construction was led by Lara Davis (Limaçon Design), a vaulting specialist and practicing architect. After refining the material selection and detailing the construction method, Davis collaborated with the Puryear Studio to build the sculpture. The work was completed over a period of two summers. Puryear considers Lookout to be the most complex sculpture he has completed to date.