If you’ve missed watching the leaves change in your New England hometown and want to remember what it feels like to walk among tree trunks, Martin Puryear’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is not the show for you. Yes, Puryear’s primary medium is wood. But his wood is not the rough stuff of tree trunks. The American artist sands, bends, weaves, carves, and staples his wood to create such an array of forms that it’s hard to believe they were all made from the same material.

MoMA’s exhibition presents an exhaustive collection of Puryear’s sculptures from the past 30 years. The Washington, D.C.-born artist began working in the late 1960s, when the reductive lines of minimalism remained a dominant aesthetic. His large sculptures—constructed from a variety of woods, as well as mesh, tar, stone, and bronze—certainly embody the minimalist sensibility. But they also are containers of contradictions. Puryear attempts to unite the internal and the external, the rough and the smooth, and the organic and the mechanical. As you walk through the galleries, pine swirls in circles on the wall, and cedar stretches over itself like a rubber band to create freestanding sculptures. Puryear makes his materials perform for you. The pieces stand in defiant glory, as if to say, “Bet you didn’t think we could do that.”

Puryear’s intimate relationship with his media enables him to create work that contradicts your original associations with the material. While you probably wouldn’t run your fingers along a tree stump— for fear of getting a splinter—Puryear transforms wood into a tactile surface that twists and bends with the subtlety of a curved torso. As one elderly woman remarked in front of the dark, glowing sculpture Self, “He makes you just want to touch them.” The woman held her hands balled at her sides, as if to keep them from wandering across the sculpture’s surface without her permission.

The nearly 6-foot sculpture that so seductively invited a caress is, in Puryear’s words, “a visual notion of the self, rather than any particular self.” Self’s abstracted form resembles a slouching figure shrouded in a black cloak. There are no distinct human features except for the hung shoulders and a curved line of the back. But the monolithic form pulls away from the viewer at every angle, as if retreating into itself.
Puryear’s work is often difficult to describe because a deftly rendered shape or line cannot be easily articulated, though the images evoke a cascade of meaning. In Brunhilde, Puryear creates a swollen shape out of strips of cedar and rattan. The bloated form suggests the inflated lungs or diaphragm of the sculpture’s namesake, a character in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The strips of wood look like they are poised in expansion, and will contract any second when the disembodied diaphragm releases air to begin a song.

Puryear loves contradictions. Walking up to a sculpture in the third gallery, you see what looks like an anthropomorphic form. A long, curved neck extends from a small, solid body and ends in a loop that seems to imply a head. It might be a giraffe, or the Loch Ness monster. But the name of the piece—Lever #3—contradicts its initial appearance entirely. What looked like an animal form from afar is in fact a mechanical one. Puryear’s work is full of surprises: marble and clay turn out to be wood, and organic forms turn out to be mechanical.

But Puryear’s work is not just technical gymnastics. In a move that might seem antithetical to minimalist art, Puryear comments on political or historical events in many of his pieces. One work, entitled C.F.A.O., presents a wheelbarrow laden with an oversized relief of a West African mask and a towering bundle of pine scaffolding. The title references the Compagnie Francaise de L’Afrique Occidentale, a 19th century trading company that ran between Marseille and Sierra Leone. Puryear recalls the massive cultural exchange (as well as exportation and exploitation) that took place during colonization.

The connections between Puryear’s sculptures and his titles often go unexplained in the exhibit, however. The curators have latched on to the artist’s reductive aesthetic and, save a couple of placards of wall text in each gallery, decided to let the sculptures speak for themselves. If you’d like to learn details about the artist’s life, or understand how the oft-abstruse titles connect to the sculptures, you’ll most likely be out of luck. But more often than not, Puryear’s sculptures are evocative enough to stand on their own.
On the second floor of the museum, five large-scale works transform the cavernous atrium into a fairy tale farmland. In Desire, a huge wheel attached to an overturned basket large enough to trap the viewer makes you feel as if you’ve stumbled onto a giant’s farm. In Ad Astra, a 58-foot branch shoots into the open air from a massive wooden boulder like Jack’s beanstalk.

A ladder suspended in the air shrinks as it ascends upward into space, creating the illusion that it continues on forever. The sculpture’s title, Ladder for Booker T. Washington, implies that the road to equality is much longer than the prominent leader would have had us believe. But the mysterious ladder also beckons us to climb it. And this is what’s so enchanting and so disconcerting about Puryear’s work—it is constantly flipping and overturning our associations with its materials and its subjects. But after wandering through his labyrinth of deceptive surfaces and double meanings, you might find that Puryear’s inconstant world is not so different from our own.