Joel Shapiro

When Joel Shapiro began showing his sculptures in the 1970s, they bucked prevailing trends: they were small rather than large in scale; figurative rather than abstract; compositionally condensed, solid, and deliberate rather than variable, open-field, and contingent; and classic rather than experimental in material. Untitled (House on Field) belongs to a body of diminutive bronze, iron, plaster, and wood sculptures he made of simple geometric forms such as chairs, tables, houses, and ladders. Usually placed directly on the floor, sometimes positioned teetering on their sides as if knocked over, these are touchingly vulnerable sculptures.

In Untitled (House on Field) the featureless house is fused to a surrounding bronze plane and placed atop a raised wooden pedestal, yet the remoteness and unapproachability of this structure, set within a seemingly vast field, speaks with just as much pathos as its floor-bound counterparts. Home registers both as a formal, architectural notation and as the locus of emotional projections and institutional formations, particularly those concerned with memories of childhood. As Shapiro explained: “This house is not engaged so much with the space that it actually occupies, but functions in a much more psychologically determined space instead. It is removed. It is very sentimental. It gives a real sense of isolation.” The replicative method of casting serves to further underscore the theme of memory. Following these early works, which stressed the interaction between an interior, associative, and imaginative space and the real space a sculpture occupies, Shapiro increasingly focused on the latter with running, tumbling, and gesticulating stick figures composed of conjoining cubic rectangles.