His work conveyed a surprising depth of emotion, hinting at the threat of imbalance. He also produced more than 30 large-scale commissions.
Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor who sought to challenge the constraints of Minimalism in works that imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 83.
His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was acute myeloid leukemia.
Mr. Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.
Often the figures appear to be walking or paused in midstep; it’s not clear if they are coming toward you or moving away. They look sturdy and almost athletic compared with the gaunt walking men of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s heroes.
Despite their narrow formal vocabulary and building-block-like clunkiness, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures convey an uncanny range of emotion and movement. From one piece to the next, his figures variously leap with apparent joy, dance balletically, fall backward, twist in existential pain, topple onto their heads or collapse onto the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Their subject, in the end, is balance, or rather imbalance — of both the spatial and mental sort.
“Every form is loaded with the psychology of its maker,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview for this obituary in 2024.
In some ways, he resembled Richard Serra, whose massive walls of tilting steel also flirted with the threat of imbalance. Yet while Mr. Serra was drawn to sweeping curves that cut horizontally through the landscape, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures are mostly vertical and echo the scale of the human body.
