Joel Shapiro

Out of the Blue

On View
Sep 13 – Oct 26, 2024
New York

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Joel Shapiro

Out of the Blue
Sep 13 – Oct 26, 2024

GALLERY

510 West 25th Street
New York

PRESS

Press Release

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Above: Portrait of Joel Shapiro, 2024. Photography by Kyle Knodell.

Pace is pleased to present Joel Shapiro: Out of the Blue at its 508 and 510 West 25th Street galleries in New York.

The artist’s first solo show with Pace in New York since 2014, this exhibition, which will be accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing with an essay by poet and scholar Vincent Katz, will run from September 13 to October 26, featuring three new large-scale painted wood sculptures and a selection of studies and small bronzes that provide a vibrant glimpse into the artist’s practice.

One of America's most renowned artists, 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. Since the early 1970s, Shapiro has sought to transcend the constraints of Minimalism to introduce a more referential, intimate, and psychologically profound mode of art. Though he is best known for helping to reshape the language of contemporary sculpture with cast bronze forms that blur the line between abstraction and figuration, he has employed various methods and materials throughout his practice and continues to explore sculpture’s ability to alter one’s sense of space and scale with works that attest to human resilience in the face of catastrophe and collapse.

Over the past two decades, the kinetic, often cantilevered compositions that defined Shapiro’s sculpture throughout the 1980s and 1990s have been torn apart and reassembled into rapturous, chromatic combinations. Prompted in part by the events of September 11, 2001, the artist began to break apart models and figures in his studio, often recombining the wooden elements using hot glue and industrial pin guns. Sometimes reworking and suspending these constructions in space with wire, Shapiro strove to create forms free from the dictates of the tabletop and floor in a process that has evolved to this day.

In Out of the Blue, Shapiro relinquishes the suspended forms of his acclaimed 2010 Pace installation—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. Splay, a spry, brightly-painted sculpture, seems to rise and reach—or perhaps bounce back—from the floor. Another work, Wave, crashes forward in a cascade of blue, green, and black triangular, shard-like elements.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a multipart sculpture, titled ARK, which careens across the gallery as it verges on taking off, its welter of brightly colored limbs and planks projecting outward as if from a maelstrom. ARK reveals a multitude of associations as one moves around and engages with its forms. Two lean, elongated volumes—one ultramarine, another pale yellow—tilt like masts or extended limbs in the air. Another blue-green element thrusts outward in conjunction with a purplish-red oblong that kisses the ground at its furthest point. From another angle, an element that suggests an elongated coffin juts forward and echoes another slightly-larger-than-human-scale form tilting upright, as it conceals yet another compressed, crimson volume below. On one side of the sculpture, a large ultramarine quadrangular plank—in conjunction with two other rectilinear planes—keels toward the viewer, obscuring the flurry of elements on the other side and creating a sense of relative calm and awe.

Complementing the larger works on view at Pace’s 510 West 25th Street gallery are small bronzes and painted wood studies in the adjacent 508 space, which offer a window into the highly intuitive and haptic mode of assemblage that constitutes the core of Shapiro’s recent practice. Although most works date from 2002 to 2022, one study—a small wood figure seemingly blown to pieces and projecting with wire from a bright green ground—dates from the early 1980s. Another—what appears to be a disjointed figure held together with thin steel rods and accentuated with acidic-orange daubs of spray paint—is from the late 1990s. Both studies anticipate the artist’s post-9/11 investigations of fracture, dislocation, and precarious connection, imbuing the array of bronzes and studies in the 508 West 25th Street gallery with a sense of vitality, tenderness, and freighted joy.

Featured Works

ARK by Joel Shapiro — Joel Shapiro, *ARK*, 2020 / 2023-2024, wood and casein, 11' 11" × 18' 8" × 8' 8-1/2" (363.2 cm × 569 cm × 265.4 cm)

Splay by Joel Shapiro — Joel Shapiro, *Splay*, 2024, wood and casein, 89-1/2" × 91-1/4" × 62-1/2" (227.3 cm × 231.8 cm × 158.8 cm)

Wave by Joel Shapiro — Joel Shapiro, *Wave*, 2024, wood and casein, 8' 4-1/4" × 7' 4-1/2" × 8' 6" (254.6 cm × 224.8 cm × 259.1 cm)

untitled by Joel Shapiro — Joel Shapiro, *untitled*, 2010, wood, casein and wire, 7 elements: 13-7/8" × 5-3/4" × 10-1/2" (35.2 cm × 14.6 cm × 26.7 cm) 5-1/4" × 11-1/2" × 15" (13.3 cm × 29.2 cm × 38.1 cm) 18-3/8" × 19-1/2" × 12" (46.7 cm × 49.5 cm × 30.5 cm) 12" × 15" × 7-1/2" (30.5 cm × 38.1 cm × 19.1 cm) 17-3/4" × 7-3/4" × 12" (45.1 cm × 19.7 cm × 30.5 cm) 23" × 11-1/2" × 11-1/2" (58.4 cm × 29.2 cm × 29.2 cm) 15-5/8" × 12-3/4" × 10-1/2" (39.7 cm × 32.4 cm × 26.7 cm)

Installation Views

About the Artist

Since his participation in the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1969, Joel Shapiro 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, Shapiro’s works attest to human resiliency in the face of catastrophe and collapse.

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