"'Sanctuary' is a reminder of just how singular an artist Puryear is. It's a serious work of contemporary art that seems to have fallen out of a fairy tale-not the monophonic Disney kind but the capricious, found-object kind collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which the moral is oblique, anything can come to life, and nobody leaves unscathed. Born in 1941, Puryear came of age at a time when sculpture was flexing its muscle through intimidating scale, conceptual rigor, and protractor-perfect geometries."
"In 1979, eight years after he'd received his M.F.A. from Yale, the cover of Artforum featured a photograph of his sculpture "Bask" (1976). A slice of a black circle cutting across the page, arced on one side and straight on the other, it might have been mistaken for an Ellsworth Kelly. Met in person, however, "Bask" is less Kelly than it is sleeping seal: a long, ground-hugging ridge of stained wood, strip-planked like a homemade canoe,"
Martin Puryear creates singular, hand-crafted sculptures that blend found objects, craft techniques, and poetic ambiguity. 'Sanctuary' (1982) uses dead wood, crossed branches, paw-like feet, and a small pine box to suggest shelter, mobility, and improvisation after a studio fire destroyed earlier work. His forms read like capricious fairy-tale objects that animate the ordinary and resist clear moral reading. He came of age amid an era of imposing, geometric, and conceptual sculpture yet developed a more intimate, organic vocabulary. Works like 'Bask' can read as minimalist shapes in reproduction but reveal warm, strip-planked, canoe-like construction in person.
Read at The New Yorker
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