Martin Puryear
One Handed Stool, 2015
Pine and maple with steel rod spine, lathe turned by hand
14 ¾” x 14 7/8”
Edition of 25 numbered with 10 Artist Proofs, numbered, dated and signed by the artist.
Numbers 2/25 through 25/25 finished with milk paint or Japan Color, hand painted in several color layers/patterns, and hand rubbed. (With use and wear the colors will continue to gain in complexity.)
Produced by Lisa Ivorian-Jones for the New Museum of Contemporary Art
Martin Puryear’s One Handed Stool, 2015, is both sculpted and functional. Exploring both color and form in equal measure, each stool has been individually and uniquely hand painted by the artist. Some are multi-layered with water-based milk paints; some are patterned; others have been treated with a wash of color, allowing the grain of the wood to be seen; and others have an unexpected underlay of paint, that makes itself known gradually. The tops and bottoms of each stool are of pine, hand turned on a lathe, and the three middle elements have been machine turned in maple, the wood hard enough to achieve the sharp pointed edges that assert themselves aside the soft curvilinear pine. Like a totem or a column, the wooden bead like elements are stacked upon one another. Each and every stool has been thoughtfully considered by this extraordinary artist to last forever, and Puryear expects them to evolve and change beautifully with wear; different layers of color emerging and revealing themselves through age.
About Martin Puryear
Martin Puryear was born in 1941 in Washington, DC, and was educated at Catholic University in Washington, the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and Yale University. His first one-person exhibition was in 1968, and since then he has exhibited throughout the world, including public commissions in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He represented the United States at the 1989 Bienal de São Paulo, where he was awarded the festival’s Grand Prize, and his work was featured in Documenta 9 in 1992. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a survey of his work, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2015 the Art Institute of Chicago organized an exhibition of fifty years of his works on paper, which traveled to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Puryear received a MacArthur Foundation award in 1989 and a National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2011. Puryear represented the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale, and a major retrospective of his work, Martin Puryear: Nexus, will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in October 2025.