Martin Puryear - "New Sculpture" - NYTimes.com 745 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street Through June 29 Martin Puryear is admired for playful, metaphorically suggestive, usually wooden sculptures made with virtuosic craftsmanship. Several pieces in this excellent show of recent efforts afford insight into the thought behind the work. "The Load," the exhibition's biggest and most intriguing piece, meditates on the modern mind. A cube-shaped cage with gridded sides that contains a giant eyeball is borne on a cart with big, antique wagon wheels. Imprisoned within a Cartesian grid, the eye looks backward but is blind to the future. Up close you discover that it has a cornea through which you can see its hollow interior and the wooden ribs and cladding of its construction. Fine craftsmanship meets philosophical allegory. "Heaven Three Ways/Exquisite Corpse" symbolizes another, transcendentalist kind of progress. Cast in silvery white bronze, it has three ascending stages: a conical base with a ramp spiraling up and around it segues into a vertical pole that bends into a horizontal spiral, from which rises a miniature stairway that gets smaller as it goes up, as if receding into empyrean infinitude. Two other pieces are in the form of abstracted heads. The toylike "Vehicle for Reflection" has a vaguely cranial cluster of crystalline, shiny stainless-steel concavities on a simple, wooden, wheeled cart. "Hominid" is a six-foot tall, multifaceted volume riding on a pair of logs for wheels. Thus two characterizations of consciousness: a bewildering, kaleidoscopic interiority, on the one hand, and an impenetrable mystery on the other, both hopefully movable.