Archive - February 15, 2023

  Over the last five decades Martin Puryear has created a body of work based on abstract organic forms rich with psychological, cultural, and historical references. His labor-intensive sculptures are made by hand at his studio in upstate New York. They combine practices adapted from many different traditions, including wood carving, joinery, and boat building, as well as more recent technology. By Dimitris Lempesis Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive Martin Puryear (Sierra Leone 1964-66) presents a solo exhibition in Los in Los Angeles after 30 years, the exhibition includes seven sculptures made over the past five years in a variety of media including wood, bronze, and stone. “Looking Askance” (2023), is constructed from red cedar and pine and finished with an oil-based paint in silvery gray. From one side, the sculpture evokes the shape of a colossal head, a form that has appeared in the artist’s work through the decades. . . .

Wall City of Diyarbakir—my “home” province for two years, from 1965-1967, and the city of the same name where I went to buy staples every week or two, went to talk with the agriculturalists and doctors who might do something in our village. Our village, Koprubasi, was about twenty kilometers on a good gravel road from the city. We went by shared minibus called a “dol-moosh.” (Dolmak is to stuff, like stuffed peppers and tomatoes—and minibuses.) Or we hopped in a wagon pulled by a tractor. The village had maybe 50 houses; Diyarbakir over 100,000 people, and the old, walled city—five kilometers of walls built over centuries by Assyrians, Armenians, Persians, Romans, Suljuk and Ottoman Turks, and Kurds—still exists alongside a new city, Yenisehir. A fortress next to the Biblical Tigris, the point at which that river is navigable. With its neighbor, the Euphrates, cradle of the Fertile Crescent, the . . .