Joel Shapiro | Untitled | 1985

Joel Shapiro, a second generation Minimal artist, has long played in the gap between abstraction and figuration, one of Modern art’s key themes. He grew up in a progressive home in Queens amidst the great social upheavals of the 1950s. Shapiro credits his two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in India for allowing him to focus on raw materials and forms. Like artists Carl Andre and Donald Judd, Shapiro uses spare geometric forms, but he uses them to create more intimate, personal and quirky sculptures. 

Shapiro’s first sculptural experiments were of tiny houses, chairs and figures, perched on floors or walls, creating their own physical and psychological space. In Untitled, from the mid-1980s, Shapiro continues to suggest contradictory ideas, stability and collapse, of defying gravity by flying and also of falling. Shapiro combines these opposite feelings by having elements jut awkwardly beyond the normal plane of a real body. By suggesting a body suspended in air, Shapiro’s figure escapes the confines of architecture. The artist rarely uses titles in his work, preferring instead that it is the forms of his sculptures, drawings and paintings that become their own language.