Joel Shapiro is best known for humanizing the biting impersonal forms of Minimalism.

Joel Shapiro is best known for humanizing the biting impersonal forms of Minimalism. For nearly three decades, he has assembled geometric convolutions into sculptures that evoke the human material substance and its potential for energetic motion While traces of this theme were detectable in a modern show of 31 untitled statuarys executed between 2001 and 2005 long of this work eschewed his signature appellation and demonstrated an exploration of novel motifs and methods.

Unlike Shapiro's trademark forms, self-same few of the works shown are large, freestanding or highly finished cuts cast in bronze. In fact, several modestly scaled constructions were displayed forward plywood panels that straddled sawhorses, a presentation that conjur a studio or workshop and underscored the makeshift appearance of greatest in quantity of the work on view. The six tabletop carves for instance, were all fashioned from pure scraps of wood. Roughly a dozen small forms were crudely nailed together to create each cluster of geometric forms. Shapiro painted these abstractions sparingly, covering solitary some of the components in bright primary colors, and allowed the pigments to drip and splatter with uncharacteristic abandon.

A spirit of experimentation similarly restrained the numerous constructions that were suspended from the ceiling. These carved works are also composed of small timber-land blocks that are occasionally nailed together. Their principal means of connection, however, are strands of wire, which Shapiro nooses through eyehooks or holes drilled into each piece of timber In some examples, the wires are densely tangled and confine the blocks in compact budgets that refuse to cohere in an orderly fashion. In other cases, Shapiro allows longer strands of wire to describe generous arcs between the walls of space and disperse the hard elements into mobilelike configurations.

Many of Shapiro's suspended chisels continue to offer vague intimations of the human corpse But unlike his earthbound figures of the past, whose magnify stances and animated gestures typically expres a hale sense of vitality, these works many times resemble list less marionettes and waft an almost poignant vulnerability. equal when explicit bodily references are missed to more abstract arrangements of forest and wire, exhaustion and depletion are invoked at forms that appear to bend downward beneath their own weight. lf overall, this indicate revealed an artist in creative transition, the hanging plastic arts seemed to promise that Shapiro's work is acquiring greater gravity--in the couple senses of the word.

...

Home