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Woods by Joel Shapiro

The Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York presents a solo exhibition on American artist Joel Shapiro, with a series of geometrical wooden sculptures that pursue color and mass.

Joel Shapiro, installation view, Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2016

Dominique Lévy gallery in New York is presenting a survey of the early wood reliefs by American sculptor Joel Shapiro. Created between 1978 and 1980, these works will be on view alongside a new site-specific installation.

The exhibition demonstrates the trajectory of Shapiro’s career, over the course of which the artist has continually pursued ideas of color and mass, culminating in a recent body of room-size sculptural installations. Shapiro has worked with the idea of form collapsing and he describes these large-scale installations as being “the projection of thought into space without the constraint of architecture.”

His early work, including the wood reliefs on show, was created in part as a response to Minimalism’s “specific objects,” wherein color, texture, weight, shape, and the dynamic relationship between object and space are prioritized. However, Shapiro’s reliefs question Minimalism’s insistence on non-referentiality, introducing again into the art object ambiguous psychological and affectual states.