Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019

Richard Shiff

Hardcover | 24.13 x 2.54 x 29.85 cm | 224 pp

Scheidegger & Spiess | 2019 | 9783858818294

This is the first-ever monograph on New York-based artist Joel Shapiro covering his entire career and all artistic media he uses. Shapiro(b. 1941)  is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world.

Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods.

In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.