Martin Puryear (b. 1941)

Gently but firmly settled on the ground, the opacity of Hero's painted cedar gives the sculpture a sense of density and mass, despite the fact that it contains only a skeletal armature. In this way Hero extends Martin Puryear's ongoing examination of the relationship between interior space, form and volume. Headlike in shape, the present work recalls the artist's earlier example, Self (1978), and is part of Puryear's fundamental artistic vocabulary. Variously manipulated, this curved, delicately swollen contour line has been integrated into various other freestanding sculptures, drawings and wall pieces.

"The strongest work for me embodies contradiction, which allows for emotional tension and the ability to contain opposed ideas...It was very important to me that a piece not be made by removal or by abrading away material, but rather that it be produced by a more rational process. It was put together piece by piece, though I finally arrived at a shape that existed a priori in my mind, and it was a carved kind of shape. It looks as though it might have been created by erosion, like a rock worn by sand and weather until the angles are all gone...[it's] all curve except where it meets the floor at an abrupt angle" (Martin Puryear, "Conversations with Martin Puryear," Martin Puryear, exh. cat., Amherst, 1984, p. 23).