NEW YORK, NY.- Pace announced the passing of Joel Shapiro on June 14, 2025 at age 83. One of America’s most renowned artists and a major figure in the history of sculpture in the 20th century, Shapiro—who also worked across drawing and printmaking—pushed the boundaries of sculptural form over the past six decades with a body of work distinguished by its dynamism, complexity, and formal elegance.

“For over 30 years, it has been my honor to represent Joel Shapiro and to count him as a close friend. His early sculptures expanded the possibilities of scale, and in his mature figurative sculptures, he harnessed the forces of nature themselves. With endless invention, the precariousness of balance expressed pure energy—as did Joel. I will miss him dearly.” – Arne Glimcher

From the start of his career in the late 1960s, Shapiro sought to transcend the constraints of Minimalism and introduce a more referential, intimate, and psychologically charged mode of art. Though he is best known for reshaping the language of contemporary sculpture with cast bronze forms that blur the line between abstraction and figuration, he employed various methods and materials throughout his practice to explore sculpture’s ability to alter one’s sense of space and scale with works that attest to human resilience in the face of adversity.

“Art,” Shapiro once said, “is about degrees of rapture, these moments of realization. It’s about a kind of self-definition and a clarification of who one is in the world.” -- Joel Shapiro

Monumental public projects were also a major part of Shapiro’s practice. Among his over 30 commissions are large-scale works for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the US consulate in Guangzhou, China, the latter a collaboration with the Foundation of Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE). His work can also be found outside the US embassy in Ottawa (FAPE); the Denver Art Museum in Colorado; Des Moines City Hall in Iowa; the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas; Sculpture International Rotterdam, the Netherlands; and in a major plaza in the French city of Orléans.

Pace has represented Shapiro since 1992, and the artist had his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 1993. Since then, Pace has mounted 17 exhibitions of his work around the world, most recently at its Tokyo space earlier this year. The gallery has also produced numerous publications on Shapiro, including a catalogue that accompanied his 2024 exhibition of new large-scale sculptures at Pace in New York. In the past several years, Pace has also shown Shapiro’s work at its galleries in Seoul and Hong Kong.