Joel Shapiro

Holistically, this survey will showcase the sculptor’s longstanding investigations of color, form, gravity, and movement, as well as his enduring interest in engaging and energizing space and architecture.

One of America's most renowned artists and a major figure in the history of sculpture in the 20th century, Shapiro has pushed the boundaries of sculptural form over the past six decades 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. Pace has represented the artist since 1992.

Monumental public projects have also been a major part of Shapiro’s practice. Among his over 30 major commissions are large-scale works for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. and the US consulate in Guangzhou, China. His work can also be found outside the US embassy in Ottawa, Canada; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His work can be found in many public collections around the world, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; the Ho-Am Art Museum, Seoul; the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London.

In his upcoming presentation at Pace Tokyo, Shapiro will exhibit a selection of small bronzes produced between 2012 and 2024 on the gallery’s first floor. Offering a window into the highly intuitive and haptic mode of assemblage that constitutes the core of Shapiro’s practice, these intimately scaled works are imbued with a sense of vitality, tenderness, and freighted joy. Retaining the qualities and characteristics from the wood patterns and forms from which they are cast, these works make the artist’s process visible and ever-present.

Upstairs, the exhibition will be roughly organized chronologically into three sections. The first will feature three early sculptures from the 1970s—when the artist was experimenting with simplified geometric shapes and the emotional weight of everyday objects like shelves, chairs, and ladders—and a freestanding bronze from 1989. The next section of the show will showcase figurative wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures that are classically and quintessentially Shapiro, including bronze and painted wood compositions that speak to the artist’s evolving investigations of materials and processes in those years. Among the sculptures in this part of the exhibition will be a freestanding, blue-painted bronze from 2019.

The exhibition will conclude with new painted wood wall reliefs and a new horizontally oriented painted wood sculpture. Shedding light on Shapiro’s use of color to energize and animate his works, these sculptures create an elegant, seemingly choreographed sense of motion in the gallery space.