3 Art Gallery Shows to See moral Now
Through Jan. 30. Matthew Marks, 522 West 22nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 243-0200, matthewmarks.com.
There are six sculptures in Martin Puryear’s outstanding exhibition of novel work at Matthew Marks Gallery — four fewer than in his show there in 2014. This may snarl the spatial expansiveness that prevails. Entering it can feel like stepping outdoors, onto a big, open field. But this effect may also consider the monumental internal scale of many of Mr. Puryear’s objects as well as their persons magnetism. Each draws us into its own world of materials and techniques, forms and meanings, creating a kind of isolation, or racy that distances it from whatever is around it. Some of this racy derives from the way the works slow down time, and opinion, by being evidently handmade at one stage or unexperienced, which blurs the line between art and craft, and downplays mature artistic ego.
Few sculptors of the past century can match the sheer diversity of Mr. Puryear’s art. Equally considerable as its physical variety is its thematic and wearisome range. With remarkable ease, his work conjures and combines different histories of art, craft and utilitarian objects; of farmland and nations; of conflicts large and small — and embeds them in form, often with the help of a meant title. (For that reason, it helps to look at this show with a checklist, which can be downloaded from the gallery’s QR code scanner.) Why miss, for example, the main meaning of one of the most beautiful and evocative works here, from 2019, by continue ignorant of its title, “A Column for Sally Hemings”? Its dedicatee was an enslaved woman of mixed raced who belonged to Thomas Jefferson and whose six children were in all likelihood fathered by him.
