JOEL SHAPIRO: OUT OF THE BLUE

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.

September 13 – October 26, 2024

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.

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.

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.