Joel Shapiro

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of work by American sculptor Joel Shapiro at its Hong Kong Gallery. On view from June 9 to July 20, the show—which will examine Shapiro’s practice from the 1990s to the present day—marks the artist’s first solo presentation in Hong Kong.

Shapiro, who has maintained a deep interest in exploring—and occasionally erasing—the line between abstraction and figuration, has also been preoccupied with the ways in which sculpture can engage and activate landscape and architecture. By utilizing various materials and procedures throughout his career, Shapiro has ceaselessly explored sculpture’s capacity to alter one’s sense of space, scale, and physicality.

Shapiro’s upcoming exhibition in Hong Kong will bring together various sculptures in wood and bronze that highlight aspects of gravity, mass, and form in the artist’s work over the past 30 years. The show will begin with two sculptures created by Shapiro in the 1990s, including a large-scale bronze from 1994–95 that draws one’s attention to the floor as well as a subtly-painted wood sculpture consisting of two entwined figures that in turn draws the viewer’s gaze up the wall of the room. A more recent, partially painted wood sculpture meanwhile appears to be frozen, mid-dash, in the middle of the space.

These somewhat heavier forms serve as counterpoints to the works on view in subsequent rooms of the exhibition, which focus on seemingly lighter, more precariously joined sculptures produced by the artist in recent years. Two of these sculptures, one painted an ethereal blue and another a soft yet brilliant yellow, are suspended from the ceiling, touching the floor ever so delicately. The third gallery space will showcase a two-part wall-mounted sculpture and a lithe, dynamic bronze.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Joel Shapiro (b. 1941, New York) has produced a body of work ranging in material, scale, and form that embraces an investigation of process and a vocabulary of rectilinear shapes. Emerging from the Postminimalist generation of the 1970s, his practice developed during a time of institutional critique, deconstruction, and urban intervention. Subverting a distinction between abstraction and representation, Shapiro reconsiders the modern figurative tradition, creating abstract geometric sculpture. He elicits a sense of movement in his works, which, through the arrangement of simplified elements, are powerfully suggestive of active human forms that appear to reach, balance, and dance, engaging viewers’ physical and psychological relationships with space.