The Martin Puryear retrospective at the National Gallery of Art is an exhibit that carpenters will love. That's because his abstract wood sculptures are so exquisitely crafted. If he weren't such a high-profile artist, you might be tempted to ask the Washington native to make a piece of furniture for you.

"It's an overwhelming experience to have my work here, because my parents brought me here to see exhibits," Puryear, 67, said at a press preview for an exhibit presenting 46 works sited throughout the museum. Visitors can see how his sculptures relate to the classical architecture of the West Building and the modern architecture of the East Building.

In the soaring rotunda of the West Building, for instance, Puryear has a sculpture that itself reaches pretty high. The ash-and-maple "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" (1996) is an actual ladder extending 36 feet into the air, and its perspective-fooling narrowing near the top makes it seem even loftier than it is. Although Puryear does not force an interpretation on you, this sculpture's title does prompt you to wonder about early 20th-century African-American leader Booker T. Washington's philosophy of gradual upward social progress.

In the East Building's atrium, "Ad Astra" (2007) includes a sapling extending 63 feet toward the ceiling. That pole is grounded in a six-foot-wide polyhedron that's mounted on wagon wheels. Besides its forceful shape, you'll be able to admire how this sculpture is crafted from ash, hickory, pine and spruce.

Throughout the show, you'll note different kinds of wood and different ways of joining that wood together; he also occasionally uses additional materials, including wire mesh and rawhide. The resulting sculptures are not directly representational, but they do refer to such basic forms as baskets, boats, buildings and, yes, furniture.

Puryear's own biographical construction includes graduating from Catholic University, observing African craftsmanship while working with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, studying printmaking and observing furniture making in Sweden, receiving his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, and eventually settling in upstate New York.

Although this sculptor stylistically came of age at a time when minimalism was in vogue, his sculptures do not have its impersonal and mass-manufactured look. He generally produces sleekly minimal sculptural forms, but they're hand-crafted and have organic associations.

"My job is to make things that have the right shape for me," Puryear observed. "I tend to be an artisan in the making of the work, so it's made by human hands."

Much of the early work in the exhibit tends to have a minimal simplicity that's not at the expense of gracefulness. An untitled painted Ponderosa pine ring from 1981-1982, for instance, consists of the wood being bent to form a thin circle that hangs on the wall like a primal lesson in geometry.

Around this same time, however, the artist was thinking about how basic materials could be brought together to create more sculptural mass. Shelter-evocative forms in the exhibit include "Bower" (1980), an elegantly curving armature made of spruce and pine; the more monolithic "Confessional" (1996-2000), whose various woods, tar and wire mesh make a box offering glimpses of an interior space, and the basswood and cypress "Thicket" (1990), in which densely crossed wood slats hinder visual access to its interior.

Some of the most pleasing pieces in the exhibit are constructions whose tilted sides and resulting odd shapes are like an exercise in creating new geometric forms. The pine "Sharp and Flat" (1987) and the Honduras mahogany, red cedar and Douglas fir "Timber's Turn" (1987) possess a sculptural presence that's easy to appreciate and perhaps more elusive with its allusions.

The Martin Puryear retrospective runs through Sept. 28 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Call 202-737-4215 or go to www.nga.gov.

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