New York Artist Joel Shapiro Has Died at 83
Sculptor Joel Shapiro pictured at Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2011. Photo by Hannolans, Wikimedia Commons
Artist Joel Shapiro, whose career spanned six decades—from the very small scale of his early fingerprint drawings and tiny chairs to monumental sculpture that defined public space—died on Saturday, June 14. He was 83. The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, according to The New York Times.
Shapiro was born in New York City in 1941 and never really left. In 1969, a young Paula Cooper included one of Shapiro’s fingerprint drawings in a group exhibition at her SoHo gallery, and she swiftly gave him his first one-man show a year later. The gallery’s website says of his work, “[it] activates and reconfigures space with his iconic vocabulary of geometric forms, shifting figural and nonreferential implications, and subtle manipulations of scale.”
Untitled (1999) in Rotterdam. Photo by K. Siereveld, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
In 2001, the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured a selection of five sculptures by Shapiro in its annual roof garden installation. London architect Eric Parry worked with Shapiro on a “floating” sculpture for a 2009 office building. Cast in bronze, the artwork, weighing over two tons, is held by six steel cables and is positioned precisely so that its heft is evenly distributed and forms a dramatic but carefully integrated part of the building’s main facade onto Savile Row. “The sculpture plays a theatrical part in the street,” said Parry at the time. “Dancing above the canopy of the entrance.”
Shapiro, whose work has often been described as Post-Minimalist, has executed more than 30 publicly sited sculptures across Asia, Europe, and North America including at the Cologne Sculpture Park in Cologne, Germany, and for the city of Orléans, France. His biggest sculpture, Loss and Regeneration—one of the few pieces he titled—was commissioned for the plaza of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Loss and Regeneration (1993) outside the entrance of the Pei Cobb Freed & Partners–designed US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Photo by Raul654, Wikimedia Commons
“When sculpture was going big and Minimal, Joel Shapiro went small and figurative, commanding space with the most limited of means and proving that geometry could carry human (often existential) meaning,” wrote art critic Roberta Smith in an Instagram tribute. “His output has greater range and variety and weird one-offs than has yet been made known. He was a wonderful artist.”
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