About Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear’s (b. 1941) printmaking is intimately connected to and revelatory of the creative process which informs his nuanced and meticulously crafted sculptures. In the artist’s words, “Prints are direct. It’s very freeing to work so directly. There is an element of immediacy about it, or there should be. In my hands it often isn’t because I tend to be difficult to satisfy in terms of getting it the way I want it.”  In his prints, Puryear uses line to investigate a form’s potential, whether schematic and minimal as in Untitled VI (State I) and Untitled VI (State II), 2012, or dense and volumetric in his description of the narrative forms in Black Cart and Phrygian.  Since 2001, he has produced twenty-three etching and aquatint editions at Paulson Bott Press, and later Paulson Fontaine Press.

Puryear’s graphic work was the subject of Multiple Dimensions, a traveling exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, which traveled to the Morgan Library & Museum, New York in 2015 and concluded its tour at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2016.