JOEL SHAPIRO: WORKS FROM 1975-2024

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Joel Shapiro at its Tokyo gallery, featuring freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures created by the artist over the last five decades, from 1975 and the present.

January 17 - February 22, 2025

This survey showcases the sculptor’s longstanding investigations of color, form, gravity, and movement, as well as his enduring interest in engaging and energizing space and architecture. One of America's most renowned artists and a major figure in the history of sculpture in the 20th century, Shapiro has pushed the boundaries of sculptural form over the past six decades 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. Pace has represented the artist since 1992.

In his presentation at Pace Tokyo, Shapiro exhibits a selection of small bronzes produced between 2012 and 2024 on the gallery’s first floor. Offering a window into the highly intuitive and haptic mode of assemblage that constitutes the core of Shapiro’s practice, these intimately scaled works are imbued with a sense of vitality, tenderness, and freighted joy. Retaining the qualities and characteristics from the wood patterns and forms from which they are cast, these works make the artist’s process visible and ever-present.

“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.”