Joel Shapiro has died at the age of eighty-three. Shapiro worked with sculpture to push the boundaries of figuration and abstraction, often working on a monumental scale as he sought to transcend the constraints of Minimalism with a more psychologically charged mode of art.
He became best-known for his sculptural figures constructed from wooden beams, suggestive of a human figure walking, dancing or toppling over, which bring to the fore a fragile sense of equilibrium.
He worked on over 30 public commissions, including works for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, featuring a solitary falling figure and an upended house cast in bronze; the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the US consulate in Guangzhou; and Sculpture International Rotterdam.
Born in Queens, New York in 1941, Shapiro studied medicine at New York University before spending two years in India with the Peace Corps. His career took off following his return to New York in 1967, with his first solo exhibition held at Paula Cooper’s gallery in SoHo. Cooper continued to represent Shapiro until he left the gallery for PaceWildenstein (now Pace Gallery) in 1992.
The Whitney Museum of American Art staged a midcareer retrospective of Shapiro’s work in 1982, featuring both sculptural work and his works on paper, including abstract compositions in chalk and charcoal. His earliest work saw him press his fingerprints in repeating rows on to lengths of paper, imbuing his work indelibly with the intimate mark of their creator.
Shapiro staged major solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, among other institutions around the world.
‘Art is about a kind of self-definition and a clarification of who one is in the world,’ Shapiro once said. As he added in a 2024 interview: ‘What you’re looking for when you work is a little moment of rapture.’
