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Lot Essay
Executed in 1981, Martin Puryear’s Larx is an early example of the artist’s simple, elegant forms which belie the complex historical, cultural, and psychological references that are embedded within each work. Fashioned out of a continuous piece of wood, Larx speaks to the circular, yet opened-ended, nature of life. Puryear came to art as a painter and thinks of his wall-mounted sculptural Rings in these terms. The wall becomes a support for a drawing made of wood. The present example’s exquisitely-formed shape occupies the same space on the wall as a painting would. However, instead of the composition being situated at the center, one’s eye is pulled outward towards the periphery of the circle’s edge to admire the rich, natural surface of the wood. One of his most celebrated early motifs, other examples of Puryear’s Rings works can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Supremely simple, yet sublimely beautiful, the serpentine form of Larx invites prolonged introspection. The gently curving form generates a spherical form, one that overlaps at either end. Here, two further wooden adjuncts add a further sculptural dimension to the work, acting to ‘complete’ the composition. Unlike some of his other circular works which are constructed out of conjoined pieces of wood, the main element of Larx is a single piece of Alaskan Yellow Cedar, a light-grained wood which is extremely dense and resilient. Puryear selected the young sapling that would eventually become the work and trained it into its current form by forming it into a circle shape while the wood was still ‘green’. Its hand-worked surface displays not only the evidence of the artist’s own interventions but also that of the tree’s own agency which can be seen in the knots and patterned grain visible throughout the surface of the work. As such, Larx represents the perfect synthesis of Puryear’s artistic concerns, a combination of material and workmanship to create beautiful sculptural forms.
Although not overtly referential, Puryear’s work does reflect his interest in the history of different cultures from around the world. This stems, in part, from the artist’s time spent in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone where he would watch local artisans at work; furniture making, boat building, and studying the wood carving traditions of cultures all over the world have helped in formulating the engineering techniques in his work. But it would also be remiss not to cite Modernist sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Barbara Hepworth, who both made intricate and exquisite compositions out of wood as sources of inspiration for the artist. Puryear weaves together moments from each of these cultural, technical and artistic traditions to craft a vision for his sculptures that are uniquely his own.
The present work is rooted in classical antiquity as his circular rings are often interpreted as a nod to Ouroboros, the serpent of Greek and Egyptian lore that eats its own tail—and often used to evoke the cycle of beginnings and endings, life and death, birth and rebirth. Some of the artist’s rings have also been titled more literally, such as Thylacine, named after an Australian marsupial which was hunted to extinction during the expansion of the nation’s Colonialization. With their imperfections, the rings’ form and surface also seem reflect the Japanese embrace of subtle flaws in ceramics and carpentry. As Tado Ando said “The Japanese don’t complete the circle out of respect”.
However, despite the numerous influences that pervade his work, Puryear has often spoken about its open-endedness, stating that they can be understood on a number of levels and can be approached without any prior knowledge or understanding of art or art history. The artist speaks passionately about the beauty contained within the craftmanship that goes into his work. The present work enacts such beauty; its elegant form encompass both the simplicity of modernism and the formal properties of tribal artifacts. In its making and meaning, Larx is as complex and subtle as the artist who crafted it.
Supremely simple, yet sublimely beautiful, the serpentine form of Larx invites prolonged introspection. The gently curving form generates a spherical form, one that overlaps at either end. Here, two further wooden adjuncts add a further sculptural dimension to the work, acting to ‘complete’ the composition. Unlike some of his other circular works which are constructed out of conjoined pieces of wood, the main element of Larx is a single piece of Alaskan Yellow Cedar, a light-grained wood which is extremely dense and resilient. Puryear selected the young sapling that would eventually become the work and trained it into its current form by forming it into a circle shape while the wood was still ‘green’. Its hand-worked surface displays not only the evidence of the artist’s own interventions but also that of the tree’s own agency which can be seen in the knots and patterned grain visible throughout the surface of the work. As such, Larx represents the perfect synthesis of Puryear’s artistic concerns, a combination of material and workmanship to create beautiful sculptural forms.
Although not overtly referential, Puryear’s work does reflect his interest in the history of different cultures from around the world. This stems, in part, from the artist’s time spent in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone where he would watch local artisans at work; furniture making, boat building, and studying the wood carving traditions of cultures all over the world have helped in formulating the engineering techniques in his work. But it would also be remiss not to cite Modernist sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Barbara Hepworth, who both made intricate and exquisite compositions out of wood as sources of inspiration for the artist. Puryear weaves together moments from each of these cultural, technical and artistic traditions to craft a vision for his sculptures that are uniquely his own.
The present work is rooted in classical antiquity as his circular rings are often interpreted as a nod to Ouroboros, the serpent of Greek and Egyptian lore that eats its own tail—and often used to evoke the cycle of beginnings and endings, life and death, birth and rebirth. Some of the artist’s rings have also been titled more literally, such as Thylacine, named after an Australian marsupial which was hunted to extinction during the expansion of the nation’s Colonialization. With their imperfections, the rings’ form and surface also seem reflect the Japanese embrace of subtle flaws in ceramics and carpentry. As Tado Ando said “The Japanese don’t complete the circle out of respect”.
However, despite the numerous influences that pervade his work, Puryear has often spoken about its open-endedness, stating that they can be understood on a number of levels and can be approached without any prior knowledge or understanding of art or art history. The artist speaks passionately about the beauty contained within the craftmanship that goes into his work. The present work enacts such beauty; its elegant form encompass both the simplicity of modernism and the formal properties of tribal artifacts. In its making and meaning, Larx is as complex and subtle as the artist who crafted it.