SOMA – Foundry Square

Untitled by Joel Shapiro

In 2003 Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

“Shapiro’s renown rests on his having turned the vocabulary of minimal sculpture back toward figuration about 30 years ago. He took square wood beams, favorite forms of his older contemporary Carl Andre, and made structures of them that could be read as stick figures. Shapiro then abbreviated and exaggerated his work’s figural qualities so that they come and go depending on the viewer’s position and on his determination to see them. Built-in aspects of “bad fit”–apparent right angles that turn out to be oblique, slight off-square rotations–read expressively from one viewpoint, and willfully abstract from another. Large scale has defeated Shapiro on occasion, making his work look like small ideas inflated rather than like products of enlarged thinking. Standing 24 feet high, the Foundry Square piece is an unusually good example. Its plaza setting touches off an apt association to the work of Alberto Giacometti, for whom urban crossings symbolized the modern world’s banishment of humanity from all common spaces. Much of Shapiro’s best sculpture updates the drama of emotional versus physical distance central to Giacometti’s mature work. As the public focal point of a corporate work environment, the Shapiro also monumentalizes the perilous balancing act that sums up so many employees’ experiences of office politics”

Joel Shapiro grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, New York. When he was twenty two he lived in India for two years while in the Peace Corps. He received a B.A. in 1964 and an M.A. in 1969 from New York University.  He lives with his artist wife, Ellen Phelan, in New York City.