NYAB Event - Joel Shapiro “Works on Paper 2011

Joel Shapiro “Works on Paper 2011 – 2013”

The Pace Gallery (508 W 25th St)

This event has ended.

In these works, Joel Shapiro extends the investigations of his recent suspended sculptures [Pace Gallery, 2010; Museum Ludwig, 2011; Rice University Art Gallery, 2012] that explore the dispersion of form and color in space, exchanging the three-dimensional space of the gallery for the two-dimensional plane of the paper, and industrial cordage and pigment-soaked wood forms for aqueous eruptions of line and color in gouache and charcoal. Alternately deeply saturated and sparsely marked, all of the works are imbued with the intensity and vitality that have been hallmarks of his sculpture since the 1970s.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes the essay, “Notes on Drawing and Being Drawn: Joel Shapiro, Works on Paper,” by Peter Cole, poet, translator and MacArthur Fellow. The drawings in the exhibition, Cole writes, “absorb our gaze as the paper absorbed the pigments he deployed there: the pooling of inks in the pulp’s topography; archipelagos of splatter in a given corner; the interaction of layered textures; the fern-like symmetries of off-kilter folds. If Shapiro’s signature sculptures seem to be projected out of a previous history or state, and to be moving into what they’re always about to become, these largely gouache inventions float up out of the ground of their whiteness, calling us into their dramas.”

Cole notes also that the recent works are a significant departure from those exhibited in 1984 and “show [Shapiro] spiraling back to the medium with greater abandon. The choreography and chromaticism that emerge are both richer and more naïve than anything in the early non-geometric pieces, more indulgent, but also somehow more understanding—in the sense of resisting the intelligence almost successfully (as Wallace Stevens said that poetry should).”

Joel Shapiro (b. 1941, New York City) received both his B.A. (1964) and M.A. (1969) from New York University. Since his first one-artist exhibition in 1970, his work has been the subject of nearly 160 solo exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. He has been included in prestigious group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1979, 1981, 1989), Documenta (1977, 1982), and the Venice Biennale (1980). Shapiro was elected to the Swedish Royal Academy of Art in 1994 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. In 2005, he received the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, on the occasion of his exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay.