Remembering Joel Shapiro

Pace is deeply saddened to announce the passing of Joel Shapiro on June 14, 2025 at age 83. One of America's most renowned artists and a major figure in the history of sculpture in the 20th century, Shapiro—who also worked across drawing and printmaking—pushed the boundaries of sculptural form over the past six decades with a body of work distinguished by its dynamism, complexity, and formal elegance.

From the start of his career in the late 1960s, Shapiro sought to transcend the constraints of Minimalism and introduce a more referential, intimate, and psychologically charged mode of art. Though he is best known for reshaping the language of contemporary sculpture with cast bronze forms that blur the line between abstraction and figuration, he employed various methods and materials throughout his practice 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 adversity.

Pace has represented Shapiro since 1992, and the artist had his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 1993. Since then, Pace has mounted 17 exhibitions of his work around the world, most recently at its Tokyo space earlier this year. The gallery has also produced numerous publications on Shapiro, including a catalogue that accompanied his 2024 exhibition of new large-scale sculptures at Pace in New York. In the past several years, Pace has also shown Shapiro’s work at its galleries in Seoul and Hong Kong.

Born in New York City in 1941, Shapiro received both his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from New York University. In 1969, the same year he completed his MA, the artist was included in the landmark group exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He presented his first solo exhibition in 1970 at Paula Cooper Gallery. Shapiro’s earliest shows often featured small, simplified sculptures of everyday objects such as houses, chairs, and other recognizable forms, which presented a serious—if subtle—challenge to the then-dominant ethos of Minimalism. Experimenting with scale and memory using these representational yet reductive sculptures, Shapiro called his early work “a physical manifestation of thought in material and form.”

In the 1980s, Shapiro began to challenge himself, pushing past the smaller forms that had defined his work of the previous decade and producing his first life-size sculptures, many of which suggested a human figure in various states of animation or upheaval. Deeply invested in the details of his work’s construction and realization, he further dedicated himself to bronze casting throughout the decade, always seeking, however, to retain the often tender qualities of the wood patterns and forms from which the bronzes were originally cast. As the works grew larger and more complex and ambitious, Shapiro began to attract increasingly international recognition, presenting major solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among other institutions around the world.

Over the past two decades, the kinetic, often cantilevered compositions that defined Shapiro’s sculpture throughout the 1980s and 1990s were 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. Through his highly intuitive mode of assemblage, Shapiro continually renewed his investigations of scale, form, and movement, as well as his dedication to finding a more emotional, buoyant, and even occasionally rapturous language of sculpture.

“Shapiro’s sculptures generate emotion-inducing images like those we encounter through novels, a parallel form of figuration,” the art historian Richard Shiff wrote on the occasion of Shapiro’s 2007–08 solo exhibition with PaceWildenstein in New York. “Fictions or figured things expand people’s consciousness, the range of their feelings, and their awareness of their feelings.”

In recent years, Shapiro has presented solo exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin; Yale University Art Gallery; Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland; and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. His awards and accolades include his election to the Swedish Royal Academy of Art in 1994 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. In 2005, the French Minister of Culture named Shapiro Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters.

The artist’s work can be found in numerous public collections in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas; the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Tate and The British Museum in London; IVAM Centre Julio González in València, Spain; the Serralves Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden; Nykytaiteen Museo, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Leeum-Hoam Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea; and the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Kanagawa, Japan.