The Brooklyn Rail

Paula Cooper has been activating the currently uneasy New York art scene with a number of ambitious and inventive exhibitions, such as this presentation of the late Post-Minimalist sculptor Joel Shapiro, which runs alongside an equally compelling gathering of Sophie Calle’s work. The current exhibition presents a revealing range of Shapiro’s well and lesser-known works in bronze, cast iron, wood, and charcoal, staged together in an installation that is its own work of art. Here are pieces that summarize Shapiro’s signature styles, which were various and, as we see in the show, concerned with such basic formal issues as placement and positioning.

This is your life, Joel Shapiro—at least a critical period of it! It’s also your art. Paula Cooper has dug into her own personal holdings as well as the gallery’s to present this wonderful, elegant exhibition of work from 1971 to 1980. Installed with ample space to experience the work, it is essentially a retrospective of those formative years, composed of objects, mostly sculptures, such as a small rounded cast-iron piece resembling a teardrop or a delicate crustacean, that address problems in the genre. Complementing the sculptures are a number of works on paper, particularly a compound geometric drawing curiously composed of an unlikely combination of cast iron and chipboard. One small, poignant work included here takes the form of a tiny house balanced at the end of an architectural support, appearing as an almost sentimental allusion (as is often the case in Shapiro’s work) to home and design. Such domestic pieces are shown together with Shapiro’s assertive and playful colored-bronze figurative sculptures that hint at comical self-appraisal and allow for the viewer’s emotional response, as does a small, surprising drawing of thumbprints. This lets us realize that Shapiro’s solid yet eccentric work is autobiographical in nature, characterized by introspection and wit.

A splendid charcoal on paper drawing from 1976 hints at a slightly skewed floor plan reminiscent of Mel Bochner’s measurement compositions. Here we see Shapiro within the context of his time and place in the art landscape—but markedly and stubbornly himself throughout. He inhabits his own personal houses with his own suggestive furnishings, such as a modest set of modernist bronze shelves together with small clay shapes, some of which look something like rocks while others take wonderful, peculiar, unidentifiable shapes—all untitled. Abstraction is often married to figuration in unexpected ways, as in a stick figure of a tree, but positioned like a human with outstretched and disconnected limbs, or a heavy block of steel with two appendages reaching out as if stretching. Altogether, we are being shown a speculative glimpse of life in progress, with stick figures walking on air and small but solid iron houses skewed yet somehow balanced.

Nature also hangs tough in this show, with sketched images of Shapiro’s familiar, sometimes-fragile trees posing awkwardly but assuredly. The sense of balance and the basic link between art and humanity is wonderfully expressed in a massive gouache on paper drawing depicting a Minimalist block, a torso-cum-building structure holding tight to its place. Many of these pieces seem to be struggling to define themselves beyond mere abstract forms. They seem to inhabit styles struggling for definition, canted in directions that assume almost balletic stances or hold the ground with improbably gnarled “feet.” Shapiro’s productions are at once forthright and undetermined.

Time has been kind to Shapiro, allowing us to gradually digest his work and see it, as we do here, in its boldness and subtlety, sharing its thoughts and moods. Therein lies the artist’s poetic and acerbic nature, expressed in ways that are happily out of sync with today’s less focused and more confusedly gestural landscape.