Joel Shapiro
Pace Gallery, New York
September 13 – October 26, 2024
Photography by Kyle Knodell
Pace presents an exhibition of new large-scale works by Joel Shapiro at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The artist’s first solo show with Pace in New York since 2014, this presentation, which is accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing featuring an essay by poet and scholar Vincent Katz, spotlighting three never-before-exhibited painted wood sculptures.
One of America's most renowned artists, Joel Shapiro has pushed the boundaries of sculptural form over the course of his 55-year career with a body of work distinguished by its dynamism, complexity, and formal elegance. Over the past two decades, the kinetic, often cantilevered compositions that defined Shapiro’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s have been torn apart and reassembled into newly rapturous, chromatic combinations. In his upcoming show in New York, Joel Shapiro relinquishes the suspended forms of his 2010 Pace installation—which the late critic Peter Schjeldahl described in The New Yorker as “like a Malevich canvas bursting to life in 3-D”—and returns with renewed vigor to vibrant, precariously joined, free-standing sculptures that, although floor-bound, retain intimations of flight, expansion, and buoyancy. All the works in this exhibition began as studies between 2020 and 2022, and the centerpiece is a multipart sculpture, ARK, which careens across the gallery as it verges on taking off, its brightly colored limbs, volumes, and planks projecting outward as if from a maelstrom.
Since his participation in the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1969, JOEL SHAPIRO (b. 1941, New York) has sought to transcend the constraints of minimalism and introduce a more referential and psychologically direct mode of sculpture. Perhaps best known for reshaping the language of contemporary art with cast bronze sculptures that blur the line between abstraction and figuration, Joel Shapiro’s works attest to human resiliency in the face of catastrophe and collapse. The artist has employed various methods and materials throughout his practice and continues to explore sculpture’s ability to alter our sense of space and scale. With more than 30 commissions and public sculptures in Asia, Europe and North America, Joel Shapiro has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide. His work can be found in important public collections including, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
PACE GALLERY NEW YORK
510 West 25th Street, New York City
