- 14
Joel Shapiro
Description
- Joel Shapiro
- Untitled
- bronze
- 104 by 193 by 130cm.
- 41 by 76 by 51 1/4 in.
Catalogue Note
This interest in the psychological developed over the following decades into a body of work that both retains an abstract and scaled-down aesthetic and achieves a suggestive, often anthropomorphised figuration. As Shapiro explained: ‘I am interested in those moments when it appears that a figure is a figure, and other moments when it looks like a bunch of wood stuck together – moments when it simultaneously configures and disfigures’ (Joel Shapiro, ‘Commentaries’, in Joel Shapiro (exhibition catalogue), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1982, p. 101).
Created in 2013, Untitled exemplifies Shapiro’s virtuosity in this respect. The rectangular bronze pieces at first sight appear to be arbitrarily connected; on closer inspection the deliberateness of their construction becomes apparent. This is in part the result of Shapiro’s working process; he usually creates a small wooden model, adjusting the separate elements through trial and error to achieve the decisive form. These scale models are worked up into larger wooden forms that are then cast in bronze or aluminium. The dynamism inherent in this methodology is retained when the works are cast in metal, as is the rough grain of the wood, lending the works an animation that accounts for much of their expressivity. Although suggestive of a reclining figure, Untitled evades such precisions; the work is predicated by an inherent instability, a sense of flux, shifting under the eye into ever-changing patterns and arrangements and constantly eliding the gap between configuration and disfiguration.