Joel Shapiro

"Joel Shapiro is among the preeminent American sculptors of our time. Shapiro came to maturity with the Post-Minimalist generation of the 1970s. He first became widely known for small but intense sculptures of simple house shapes and for other tiny structures, such as ladder or a bridge, installed in isolation in the open and uninterrupted spaces of gallery floors. By the 1980s Shapiro had embraced figurative sculpture making the works for which he is know famous. His blocky, off-balance figures appear somehow to both dance and fall, as they bend, pivot, seem to lose their balance, and then recover themselves all at the same time."--BOOK JACKET.