Meridiano is pleased to announce Joel Shapiro: Four Bronzes, the first solo exhibition of the artist in Mexico, opening Friday, February 2, 2024. Presenting four large-scale works spanning twenty-five years of the artist’s career, the exhibition foregrounds Shapiro’s radical refinements to the core elements of sculpture: gravity, structure, and movement. Across the installation, Shapiro dynamically engages with the immersive architecture of the gallery, a site along the Oaxacan coast whose structure is echoed within the artist’s consideration of the expressive capabilities of essential forms, lines, and colors.

Renowned for developing a distinctive formal language in the 1980s and ’90s that confronted the dominant severity of minimalism, the artist’s simplified geometric compositions fluidly move between figuration and abstraction. Blurring the boundary between the formal and the personal, Shapiro’s sculptures relate to this history of reduction while favoring the dynamic possibilities of gesture intrinsic to the artist’s work since the early 1970s. In dialogue with one another for the first time, the freestanding sculptures alongside one wall-mounted work explore the spatial implications of balance and weight. Each of the bronze sculptures, whose rich surfaces range from pale copper and gunmetal patinas to brightly painted blue, retain the milled grain texture of the original wood forms Shapiro uses to create his castings.