VAULT: Martin Puryear Explores Human Scale (1999)

Getty Museum

05.12.2019

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“I figure take the measure of the human being as a kind of index for the scale of the work, rather than the size of the surrounding architecture. And really use the entire backdrop of the sky and the landscape behind as a sort of a screen or something that you could see a view through, and sort-of work as a drawing in space that would change as you walked around it.” —Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear (b. 1941, Washington, DC) is no stranger to working on a monumental scale that serves to highlight not just our own scale as humans, but that also serves to foreground our strengths and frailties, and our ambitions and hidden stories. For this unique and influential visual language, Puryear was selected to represent the United States at the 58^th Venice Biennale. Puryear’s installation Liberty/Libertà is presented in this edition by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, commissioned and curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport.

In 1999, Puryear was commissioned by the Getty Museum to install a large public sculpture on the Getty Center’s tram arrival plaza, That Profile (1999). In this video from the Getty, Puryear speaks about the commission – no doubt also shedding light on his commission for the American Pavilion – and we see fantastic behind-the-scenes shots of the fabrication, moving, and installation of the sculpture.