On the wall

Joel Shapiro (1941–2025)

Currently on view in the back room at Ino: Four prints on loan from Gemini G.E.L at Joni Weyl.

Ino is honored to exhibit four prints by Joel Shapiro (1941–2024), a towering figure in postwar American art who sadly passed this past June. Over five decades, Shapiro transformed the language of abstraction, distilling complex emotion and movement into forms that feel both rigorously constructed and vividly human.

Best known for his kinetic, off-balance sculptures, Shapiro also embraced printmaking as a medium of exploration and immediacy. The works on view span screenprint, lithograph, woodcut, and collage techniques, each revealing a distinct facet of his restless visual intelligence.

In UP DOWN AROUND , vivid chromatic shapes tumble and pivot across the surface, evoking motion and tension with architectural clarity. FOR STUDIO, a 6-color woodcut made as a benefit edition for Studio in a School, softens that energy into a study of quiet balance. GO (For Obama) is compact and exuberant—a screenprint of compressed optimism, created for an Obama fundraiser as a gesture of political affirmation and joy. The most lyrical of the group, BOAT, BIRD, MOTHER AND CHILD, combines screenprint and collage in twelve printings, alluding to narrative and figuration through abstraction—both playful and tender.

These works, installed in Ino’s rear dining room, reflect Shapiro’s deep engagement with structure, emotion, and visual rhythm. They are on loan from Gemini G.E.L at Joni Weyl, whose collaboration with Joel and many of his peers, has helped bring many works on paper of this generation to light . We are grateful for the opportunity to share them here, and for the fond memory they illicit of Joel.

Joel once said that “drawing is a way of approaching the world—it’s about thinking, feeling, and discovering,” a sentiment recalled by critic Dave Hickey in his meditation on the artist’s work. In that spirit, these prints invite us to pause—to look closely, feel deeply, and remember the clarity and humanity of Shapiro’s vision.

On loan through October, this is the first of many anticipated collaborations with contemporary artists.