JOEL SHAPIRO

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. Over the past two decades, the kinetic, often cantilevered compositions that defined Shapiro’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s have been torn apart and reassembled into newly rapturous, chromatic combinations. In his upcoming show in New York, Shapiro relinquishes the suspended forms of his 2010 Pace installation—which the late critic Peter Schjeldahl 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. All the works in this exhibition began as studies between 2020 and 2022, and the centerpiece will be a multipart sculpture, ARK, which careens across the gallery as it verges on taking off, its brightly colored limbs, volumes, and planks projecting outward as if from a maelstrom.