Joel Shapiro: Out of the Blue
Joel Shapiro: Out of the Blue 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10016 September 13–October 26, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – 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, opened on September 13 and will run until 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.
Joel Shapiro untitled, 2002 wood, wire and casein 27" × 31" × 31" (68.6 cm × 78.7 cm × 78.7 cm)
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.
Joel Shapiro: Out of the Blue 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10016 September 13–October 26, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
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.
Portrait of Joel Shapiro, 2024 Photo Credit : Kyle Knodell
Joel Shapiro untitled, 1998 wood, steel rod, spray paint and hot glue 20-1/4" × 14" × 13-3/8" (51.4 cm × 35.6 cm × 34 cm)
Since his participation in the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1969, Joel Shapiro (b.1941) has been the subject of numerous solo and retrospective exhibitions worldwide, at institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1980); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1985); the Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Humlebæk, Denmark and IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia, Spain (1990–91); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (1995–96); the Haus der Kunst, Munich (1997–98); the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom (1999–2000); the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001); the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2005); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2011); the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); the Yale University Art Gallery (2018); and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin (2018).
Shapiro’s work can be found in numerous public collections in the United States and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Tate, London; IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia; the Serralves Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Leeum-Hoam Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea; and the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Kanagawa, Japan.
Joel Shapiro untitled (structural study for 20 Elements), 2004-05 wood and casein 16-1/4" × 17-3/4" × 11-1/2" (41.3 cm × 45.1 cm × 29.2 cm)
In 1993, Shapiro installed Loss and Regeneration at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Other prominent commissions and publicly sited works include Conjunction for the United States Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, on behalf of the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE); Verge for 23 Savile Row, London; For Jennifer, commissioned by the Denver Art Museum; Now, commissioned by FAPE and installed in 2013 at the new U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China; 20 Elements, which is on permanent display as part of the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection at NorthPark Center, Dallas; and Blue, which was installed in 2019 on the grounds of The Reach at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Shapiro was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Art in 1994 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. The French Minister of Culture named Shapiro Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in 2005.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960. Holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, Pace has a unique history that can be traced to its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery continues to nurture its longstanding relationships with its legacy artists and estates while also making an investment in the careers of contemporary artists, including Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, and Marina Perez Simão.
Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher and President Samanthe Rubell, Pace has established itself as a collaborative force in the art world, partnering with other galleries and nonprofit organizations around the world in recent years. The gallery advances its mission to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences and collectors around the world through a robust global program anchored by its exhibitions of both 20th century
and contemporary art and scholarly projects from its imprint Pace Publishing, which produces books introducing new voices to the art historical canon. This artist-first ethos also extends to public installations, philanthropic events, performances, and other interdisciplinary programming presented by Pace.
Today, Pace has eight locations worldwide, including two galleries in New York—its eight-story headquarters at 540 West 25th Street and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. The gallery’s history in the New York art world dates to 1963, when it opened its first space in the city on East 57th Street. A champion of Light and Space artists, Pace has also been active in California for some 60 years, opening its West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in 2022. The gallery maintains European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where it established an office in 2023. Pace was one of the first international galleries to have a major presence in Asia, where it has been active since 2008, the year it first opened in Beijing’s vibrant 798 Art District. It now operates galleries in Hong Kong and Seoul and opens its first gallery in Japan in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills development in 2024.
The exhibition opened on September 13 and will be on view until October 26 at Pace’s New York location at 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10016.. Please visit the Pace Gallery's website here for more information about this exhibition and others. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
