Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Joel Shapiro
American (b. 1941)
UNTITLED (1976)
charcoal on paper
38.25” x 50”

STYLE: 70s SCULPTURE

  

Born in New York, Joel Shapiro left New York University with the intention of becoming a doctor, but, after two years in the Peace Corps, he returned to receive an M.A. in fine art. He soon began exhibiting and won acclaim for his small, human-scale sculptures of houses and chairs. In the seventies, he began to focus on making figurative work, though using very basic, simplified forms. Shapiro’s interpretation of figurative sculpture is influenced by such modern masters as Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti, especially Brancusi’s emphasis on the reduction of sculptural form to its essential elements. Shapiro’s sculpture, drawings, and prints are in collections throughout the world, including a commission for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C

This untitled drawing reproduces the crisp, energetic forms Shapiro uses in his sculpture, while adding the rich texture of the charcoal and paper media. Like many of the drawings and paintings of great sculptors, the work adds new understanding and a different type of viewing pleasure.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Michael Amy, Art in America, 10/03
“... Shapiro has spent many years examining the severely geometricized three-dimensional human body in a state of imbalance. He showed us how the poses and gestures of anonymous stick figures could convey a gamut of emotional states, ranging from an explosive joie de vivre to utter despair. The reason why we could project so much meaning onto these awkward forms is that whatever the scale, they referenced our own bodies, and, like us, they inhabited and even seemed to move through actual space.”
Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, 5/27/00
“Shapiro, a native New Yorker, has been famous since the mid-'70s for taking forms favored by minimal sculptors -- simple polyhedrons -- and using them to break what seemed to be the minimalist aesthetic rules.
Where minimalism avoids reference, Shapiro jams square beams together to form thick stick figures, usually without being too literal about it.
... Anyone who knows Shapiro's work may feel that he has been coasting, if not exactly repeating himself, for some years now. Yet the ambiguities of form and meaning he tapped into long ago are far from played out and even seem to keep pace with larger events.
Where his sculpture's odd disfigurements once evoked private mortifications or blows of fate, today they echo more our mindfulness of ominous impersonal realities such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.”