Lot 140
  • 140

Joel Shapiro

Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 GBP
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Description

  • Joel Shapiro
  • Untitled
  • incised with the artist's signature, dated 80 and numbered AP on the underside
  • painted bronze
  • 21.5 by 33 by 16cm.; 8 1/2 by 13 by 6 3/8 in.
  • This work is the artist's proof, aside from the edition of 3.

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1982

Literature

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Joel Shapiro: Exhibition, 1982, another example exhibited, p.66, fig. 84, illustrated

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some burnishing in places along the edges, and towards the base of the sculpture which is visible in the catalogue illustration.
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Catalogue Note

Joel Shapiro is a distinctive sculptor renowned for his bold spatial works composed of simple rectangular shapes. By 1980, when the present work was created, he had already earned international success, enjoying solo exhibitions in America, Europe, and Japan during that same year. The artist is now famous for his monumental public commissions; huge sculptures that fill town squares and municipal spaces worldwide. With Untitled Shapiro deftly distils the energy and dynamism of his monumental public works into a robust miniature.

Shapiro took considerable influence from his twentieth-century sculptural peers. Carl Andre and Donald Judd gave him the confidence to take his art off the walls and off the pediment, onto the floor and into the gallery space. Meanwhile, Sir Anthony Caro, who also earned repute for his bold large-scale metal sculptures, could have provided precedent for the seemingly precarious compositions that Shapiro tended towards, with blocks appearing to tumble and crash at any moment. Richard Serra was also owed an artistic debt. From him, Shapiro inherited that sense of enormous balanced stasis, of immutable driving weight, here compressed and condensed into a minute monolith.

The present work is bold in its cubic simplicity yet nuanced in treatment: the angular surface has been cast and painted to capture a wood grain pattern, a sculptural treatment that somewhat disguises the work’s industrial metallic composition. Indeed, this piece is an archetypal example of Shapiro’s ability to imbue his work with energy through a sculptural manipulation of geometry. Maintaining a sense of simplicity and limiting his own visual language was one of Shapiro’s stated artistic goals. To this end, Untitled is a resolute success: “I’m not going to invent some new shape. I’ve not been terribly interested in the repositioning of found objects. I am only interested in the repositioning of relatively known, simple forms” (Joel Shapiro in conversation with Michèle Gerber Klein, in: Bomb – Artists in Conversation, October 2009, online resource).