Martin Puryear changes the world through wood

It’s something that shouldn’t have body language, and yet it does. From body language, it’s a quick jump to personality. Those who grew up with Tove Jansson’s Moomins characters in “Self” may see a shadow of cold and loneliness, slouching through life with the same completely undefined shoulders, the same feeling of isolation from the world. And so it is: the large pillar in “Crane No. 1” (1988-1989) is titled Tool but strongly suggests a wagging tail. The knee-high cast iron sculpture, composed of three oval shapes, is instantly recognizable as a bird of prey perched on a rock, simultaneously evoking stillness and primal movement. (Poirier is also a trained falconer.)

In fact, Puryear was never a good fit. For sixty years, his work and career have continued to quietly challenge orthodoxy about the way important art should look, act, or be made. In an age where outsourced production is valued, making things by hand has always been preferred. He used a stint with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and two years studying printmaking at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts to learn from local carpenters, toolmakers, and furniture makers. When allowing viewers’ minds to turn away from encountering the silent, physical presence of an abstract object was seen as weakness, Puryear made room for gesture. (The eight-foot inverted funnel of “Noblesse O.” from 1987, He can (It can be viewed as a pure form, but it would be silly to deny its resemblance to the tin man’s hat.) It is as if, sometime in the 1960s, Puryear looked around at the parts of the human experience excluded from high art, and decided to invite them all in.

The exhibition title is a nod to this openness and complexity, the way in which, in any of Puryear’s work, you can choose several themes to trace – the sheer beauty of his forms and materials; His carpentry prowess. Similarities and references to nature, history, and the black artist’s musings on blackness and whiteness. Everything is connected. “Nexus” is also the name of a piece from 1979: a large, not-quite-circular cedar collar that flares slightly where the two ends meet—one painted black and the other painted white. An engraving from Borer’s student days in Stockholm shows him already rehearsing the mound form that would be repeated in many later variations, here composed of four lumpy blocks – three inked in mottled beige, one inked in black – and titled ‘Quadroon’. In the catalogue, curator Emily Lippert tells the story of Puryear’s childhood encounter with John James Audubon’s photographs of two hawksbills, one white and one black, the result of environmental adaptation. “I made the connection to human racial difference through these species,” Puryear said.

Growing up, Purer aspired to become a wildlife painter; In college, he planned to major in biology before switching to art. Nature, with its surfaces and internal logic, is constantly present throughout this show. Wall labels identify the woods used — Alaskan yellow cedar, Swiss pear, lignum — as one might name an esteemed collaborator. At a deeper level, the mechanism of repetition and mutation inherent in nature is also a Bourier mechanism. In sculptures, drawings, and prints, you can see the strange hump of the “Quadroon” straightening into a “self,” then extending into something resembling a burrowing bear, then elongating into something like a burrowing bird. In the 1920s, it swelled and acquired the distinctive checkered shape of the Phrygian hat, an emblem of freedom during the American and French Revolutions.