Joel Shapiro (b. 1941)

This work displays signs of an artist who has deeply matured; his work has grown with him and shows clear transcendence from the ankle-high floor sculptures from the early 1970s that first put Shapiro on the map. Roberta Smith wrote, “Shapiro has helped bring sculpture back from the brink of extinction, imbuing it, in the process, with a personal yet universally legible meaning.” This ‘meaning’ (one of transcendence; of memory; of the heart and soul) is made perhaps most brilliant with his outdoor work at Storm King Art Center (the open-air museum in the Hudson Valley). There, Shapiro’s 21-foot tall bronze outdoor sculpture, extends past the park’s tree tops and towards the skies. The present Untitled dances brilliantly from its fixed spot on a wall, with its limbs seemingly reaching toward the infinite space beyond its own sculptural bounds.