STEVEN MARC SHAPIRO

About the Artist

Steven Hoffman Shapiro has been working as an artist since 1980. His work explores various aspects of abstraction, the figure, narrative expression, and architectural themes. He works primarily in oils and acrylics but also explores a variety of three-dimensional media, including clay and wood constructions. Like many artists, his drawings and monoprints serve as explorations for larger works. Shapiro's paintings, drawings, and three-dimensional works have been exhibited in Alabama, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington D.C., and Venice, Italy. He has contributed to several private and corporate collections in the United States, including Johnson and Johnson and AT&T in New Jersey, and in the permanent collection of the Venice Biennale Architecture Section. Commissioned works include a series of paintings for the Chapel of the Archbishop Spalding High School in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and several works for the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, Maryland. He has an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Masters of Architecture from Yale University. He was an artist in residence at the School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Maryland from 2002 until 2005. For the past twenty years  Shapiro has taught art at a variety of area schools and colleges, has participated in exhibitions in the greater Baltimore metropolitan area, and maintained an active studio life. His current work has been focused on painting and exploring the roots and influences of his fifty-year evolution as a visual artist.

Artist's Statement

My work is characterized by duality which influences how I experience the world. I began my professional life as an architect and over many years evolved into a painter and sculptor working between utility and imagination, words and pictures, drawing and architecture, memories and dreams, process and play. My work is informed by twenty years of pursuing architecture, being immersed in the process of design, construction, and working with varied materials. Recently my focus has been on non-objective abstraction, echoing my years designing spaces, forms, and edifices for commercial, institutional, and residential buildings. But there have also been years developing figurative and narrative subjects, and decades teaching as an artist and an architect. The common thread among these experiences has been a passion for the process of design, love of layering and manipulating form and devotion to the expression of place as object, and image.  Growing up in a home filled with original paintings by my uncle influenced my earliest ambitions to become an artist, as did my education in Baltimore City public schools with the opportunity to focus on art in high school. During this time, I fell under the spell of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, which ultimately led me to my college pursuit of Architecture and influenced my belief that art could shape the world as well as reflect it. After nearly five decades of work in multiple disciplines (painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing and architecture), a body of work has evolved that draws from all of these areas. My education as a draughtsman and an architect have remained the foundation of my work but painting and sculptural construction have evolved as my primary modes of expression. I tend to work in a mixed -media approach and often in both two and three-dimensions in a single work. I see drawing and painting as integrated efforts and make few if any, distinctions between architecture and fine art.  My process is like that of an architect. My paintings and other works evolve as I move back and forth from sketches to the artwork examining and re-examining the concepts and compositions that inform them.