Sculptor Joel Shapiro, who traversed the boundaries of Minimalism with his emotive, large-scale bronze works, died on Saturday, June 14 at the age of 83. Shapiro’s passing was announced by Pace Gallery, which has represented the artist since 1992. His daughter told the New York Times that Shapiro died from acute myeloid leukemia.Shapiro was commissioned to create more than 30 large-scale sculptures in his lifetime, including “Loss and Regeneration” (1993) for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and “Blue” (2019) for the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Today, the artist’s works are housed in the collections of some of the world’s major arts institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty in Los Angeles, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.“His early sculptures expanded the possibilities of scale, and in his mature figurative sculptures, he harnessed the forces of nature themselves,” said Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher, who described Shapiro as a close friend. “I will miss him dearly.”“Untitled” (1996–99) on roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (© 2025 Joel Shapiro / Artists Rights Society; photo Ellen Page Wilson)Born in 1941 in Queens in New York City, Shapiro became active as a sculptor in the late ’60s after serving in the Peace Corps in India. The son of an army physician, Shapiro originally planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor, but failed out of University of Colorado.“I really should have been studying art,” he said of his college experience in a 1988 interview. “I think if I were, I would have been focused.”“ARK” (2020 / 2023–2024) in Out of the Blue at Pace Gallery last fallReturning to the city, Shapiro attended New York University and obtained a Master’s degree in art in 1969. That same year, he was featured in Anti-Illusion:Procedures/Materials, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that examined the production of the Post-Minimalist movement. Schapiro’s earliest works, completed in the 1970s, primarily depicted small forms of ordinary objects, including chairs and coffins. By the ’80s, the artist began experimenting with life-size forms resembling stick-figure humans in motion and gaining recognition in shows such as a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1982.“Chair” (1973–74) (photo Geoffrey Clements)Shapiro also experimented with woodcut printmaking and etchings of geometric forms similar to his hinging bronze sculptures. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Shapiro began breaking apart his figures from the 1980s and ’90s, recombining them with hot glue, and suspending them, examining themes of loss and rupture.Art historian Richard Schiff described Shapiro’s work in 2008 as “emotion-inducing,” comparing them to images found in novels.“Fictions or figured things expand people’s consciousness, the range of their feelings, and their awareness of their feelings,” Schiff wrote. Five of Shapiro’s quasi-figurative bronze and cast-aluminum works were displayed on the rooftop of The Met in 2001, cementing his monumental, sparsely constructed figures in mid-step and dynamic movement as his most recognizable works. “Art is about degrees of rapture, these moments of realization,” said Shapiro, as quoted in a Pace Gallery statement. “It’s about a kind of clarification of who one is in the world.”