"Shapiro's Peripheral VIsions is a poetic encapsulation of a periphery that exists somewhere between time and timelessness, and these works also attest to a decade gone-by for the artist. "Every 10 years I try something else." Shapiro says.. Thus, the physical-mnetaphysical encounter to be had at LABspace this month from gracefully silent metropolitan moments to the wild miscellany ofbodily eccentricity–invites us to consider the carnal and the industrial as parallel spheres of human revelry and realization."
Taliesin Thomas
April 2023 issue of Chronogram
"One of the highlights of the show are the several works by Dee Shapiro, which demonstrates just how much you can do with what seems like a grab-bag of objects. Her remarkable "My Danea" uses fabric, patterns on paper, beads, photos and yarn to weave together an image of a reclining figure that seems to effortlessly emerge from the fragmented details."
Christopher Marcisz.
2020, Berkshire Record
"I think of these works as large, bold collages, which, in terms of scale, move into a territory occupied by Robert Motherwell and Romare Bearden. It also occurred to me that Shapiro’s relationship to the P&D movement shares something with Rosalyn Drexler’s relationship to Pop Art. While Shapiro has at times employed a vocabulary associated with P&D, just as Drexler has used, say, an image of Marilyn Monroe in Marilyn Pursued by Death (1963), both women stand apart from the respective movements with which they have been associated. Instead of being members of a group, however loosely defined, they are outliers who have blazed their own path. We should praise the for their independence and for their determination to reclaim the image of woman as a subject".
John Yau
2019
"I was fascinated by your playing on and with the surface, the pen, the collage, the trompe l'oeil, getting me "in and out" the meticulous filling of the space, the definition of the patterns and the fantastic "architecture" in the composition of each piece. It is a wonderful show. I thought of how your work can be defined as abstract, but it is not, because of how dramatically organic it is, for how much the flesh and skin, under the pattern is revealed, like blood pumped within. However, when you look close, it is flat and it is paper, pattern and vibration."
Elena Berriolo
2015
"Dee Shapiro has created a jewel-toned crop of works on paper that are as beguiling as they are amusing and deviant. Shapiro's work traces its roots to the pattern-and-decoration movement of the 70's. Influenced by both feminism and with the Fibonacci progression, which dictates the design of organisms..., her early art consisted of ornate, textile-like patterns. ...the innocent playfulness of Shapiro's latest images–and their ornamental quality–insures that these provocative pieces charm rather than titillate."
Pheobe Hoban
2012
"Shapiro has been drawing small her entire career. In the landscape work of the last several years, she has compressed a CinemaScope vision into diminutive scale. The resulting images , in exquisite detail, contains as much information as you might expect from much larger paintings. What differs is our proximity to it. Shapiro compels us to look at her work close up. The absence of monumentality, like the ambiguous narrative, pulls us in, encouraging a personal exchange with the work. When we approach, we come to occupy the painting, physically, with our own size."
James Panero
2010
"Consider Nature and its repeated, interwoven and balanced complexity, every small bone, vein, twig and cell of which works in endlessly contained and perfect harmony. What has Art to do with that? Certainly no way for Art to reproduce Nature in any of its parts and manifestations. And if it tries, then Art becomes explanation and loses all its artistic hope and intent. But Art also always gets triggered by showing something that Nature contains and, once discovered, reflects. How then to distinguish the two, the miracle mechanics of Nature that create such wonder and the birth-pang of Art from which all passion comes? Art, when it exists, always shows more that can be seen. The artist, whether consciously or not, observes, digests the Nature around him then creates in the same representation the seen that is and the unseen that is. So look at Dee Shapiro's Art and see, ... the truth that shows and the truth that does not. An then in these huge little paintings you have it all."
William Louis-Dreyfus
2002