The Brooklyn Rail

The sculptures are installed across two Pace galleries, the monumental works in 510 West 25th and next door at 508, small scale works, described as studies but in fact wholly self-sufficient. Joel Shapiro has no problem with scale—internally, as the relation of parts within a work, or externally as with the size of these parts in relation to their environment—or assertive color—whether sited in a gallery space or placed outside in a public space—much like Alexander Calder or Mark Di Suvero. Take, for example ARK (2020/23–24), an 11 foot 11 inch by 18 foot 8 inch by 8 foot 8 1/2 inch casein painted, wood sculpture. Sheets and beams hover, stilled in a diagonality that is awkward and dynamic. The notion of balance is challenged. Stasis, unlikely given the gravity-denying, conjoined extensions of timber, is affecting like a dancer holding an unnatural stance, like a frozen instant in a process of collapse. This is a universe where such contradictions inhabit the space we also share, but follow very different constraints. The fragmented composite of sometimes barely-touching substantial parts embody contingency and doubt.

The chromatic range of primary—or close variants of: ultramarine and cobalt blue in this sculpture, together with two reds, warm and cool, and a yellow—is repeated in different works here. Although the color itself may have separately evoked a Russian Constructivist palette in a different context, here, with the splintered overall form and sheer size, evoked rather are Casper David Friedrich’s vast rock and ice landscapes and a concomitant, overwhelming sublime. Disaster, not playful exuberance, comes to mind, despite the bright positivism of the primary color. Splay (2024), also wood and casein, and positioned across from ARK in the same gallery space, is another large sculpture at 89 1/2 by 91 1/4 by 62 ½ inches. However, this piece extends rather than clusters and furthers the idea of balance and stasis in the captured instant. The idea of balance, or even posture, is central to many of Shapiro’s works that reference the human figure directly in form, unlike Splay. The title, of course, could easily apply to a human gesture, which brings us to how we may consider Shapiro’s expression in general: I think we cannot help but relate, as embodied beings, to the non-verbal expression of form, physically manifest, and open to reception in gesture; on the very edge of the comprehensible, at the origin of our inception of understanding through language—in physical gesturing.

At 508 West 25th, an array of diminutive-size works are presented, including untitled (1998). This is a piece one can see was assembled without the need for assistants or mechanical devices—cranes, trollies, etc.—unlike the pieces I’ve already described. The directly anthropomorphic configuration in wood and steel rod, spray painted and joined with hot glue, stands at just over 20 inches. Leaning, walking, moving; all are implied through abstractly improvised and assembled offcuts of timber; all achieved with playfully precise, unpretentious ease. Untitled (2002) employs wire to suspend isolated sections of wood in space across its 31 inch reach. Shapiro later exhibited a gallery-sized installation of freely suspended wooden sections at the Museum Ludwig, Köln’s Oberlichtsaal in 2011. Though this 2002 piece is not a study for the Köln installation, another piece here is a study for a larger work, untitled (structural study for 20 Elements) (2004–05). Its tight grouping of intensely colored, rectangular wooden elements cascading from the base brings to mind ARK at a hand-manipulable size. In a time of computer modeling, Shapiro inadvertently shows us what is lost in not engaging dialogically with material itself, both us as material and the objects we encounter—what is lost, inescapably and dangerously, is an ability to recognize the gesture for what it can communicate, in substituting for it a false equivalency: technology.