Shapiro’s geometric sculptures explore the nebulous boundary between abstraction and figuration. He arranges compositions from found and cut rectangular wood beams that are then cast in bronze. Though lacking human features, these sculptures suggest bodies posed or in motion. "I wanted to make work that stood on its own and wasn’t limited by architecture and by the ground and the wall and right angles,” the artist has said.(1) Arrangements of planks generate a sense of anthropomorphic qualities, redefining the viewer’s physical and psychological relationship to the sculpture. Upon close observation, we begin to identify with his structures and recognize a body like our own in them. Perhaps the figure is a gymnast mid-routine or a break-dancer spinning on top of the pedestal. Shapiro's rectangular metal forms often evoke a sense of precarity, of a body poised at the highest point of exertion or even about to fall. In his practice, Shapiro responds to the conventions of Minimalist sculpture, casting aside the movement’s interest non-figurative sculpture but preserving its interest in a dynamic relationship between a sculpture and the physical experience of the viewer who encounters it. Shapiro‘s work elicits a sense of kinship from the viewer, who finds themself responding to the sculpture as if it were a person. As art historian Donald Kuspit explains: “Shapiro’s sculptures are a kind of transitional object: they are overt experiments in form that signal covert experiments in feeling, reflective of the new sense one has of oneself when it is face to face with a new reality—the unknown space beyond oneself.”(2) 

1) Michèle Gerber Klein,” Joel Shapiro”, BOMB (Fall 2009), October 1, 2009, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2009/10/01/joel-shapiro-interviewed/

2) Donald Kuspit, ”The Aliveness of Tentative Form: Joel Shapiro’s Sculptures” in Joel Shapiro: Tracing the Figure. exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center, 13.