Paul Shapiro is a Santa Fe painter whose career has run across the seam between American Abstract Expressionism, landscape, and a nature-rooted contemporary abstraction — a Boston-trained artist whose 1982 move to New Mexico opened the second and ongoing phase of a working life spanning more than six decades.
Paul Shapiro (born December 26, 1939, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American painter associated since 1982 with the Santa Fe, New Mexico, art community. He attended Northeastern University in 1957–58 and completed his art training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston between 1959 and 1962. His earliest mature work belonged to the late wave of American Abstract Expressionism; a 1970 Paris exhibition of early-twentieth-century European Expressionist painters prompted him to redirect his practice toward landscape, and from 1969 to 1980 he served as Senior Lecturer at Northeastern University and University College, teaching painting, drawing, and design.
His 1982 move to Santa Fe consolidated the landscape practice he had been developing through the 1970s, and in the early 1990s he shifted back into abstraction — though the long observation of New Mexican land, light, and weather continued to inflect the abstract paintings that followed. His recent Quantumscape series extends those concerns into a contemporary nonobjective vocabulary inspired by natural forces and the landscape. He received the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2010, and his work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally in Switzerland, Denmark, and other European venues.