Willard Boepple American, b. 1945
“I am an abstract sculptor and I believe in the power of wordless, unadorned visual relationships, movements in space to create and evoke soaring sensations of love and discovery.”
Internationally recognised as a leading contemporary abstractionist, Willard Boepple is highly regarded for an extensive oeuvre of sculpture and works on paper created over the course of over fifty years. Boepple’s graphic work in particular is distinguished by a combination of complex layering of form with a distilled and harmonic sense of geometry. Colour and intersection of shape and line create movement and a moving architecture made of light and transparent hue.
A sense of kinetic experimentation within pared down geometric shapes and forms is reflected in the artist’s fascinating and creative process for making a print. This begins with a drawing made through the arrangement of shapes and movements where forms “abut, bend, slide and fold adjacent to other shapes and become another shape entirely.”
The printmaking series are in fact a variation on the original drawing and the next stage takes place when the image is broken down into its component shapes. The deconstructed shapes from the original drawing are transferred onto the screen and paper and coloured ink is squeezed through the shape on the screen and onto the paper and repeated for each shape. The artist notes that this first inking is only the beginning and shares that they will return to the process: “It is during this building process, the layering of the colours, that exploration of the image or form takes place - changing, strengthening, and layering different colours into each shape and sometimes cropping off bits of a shape. Typically, we will work on a group of a dozen sheets at a time and working directly in this fashion, we will make changes from sheet to sheet.”
Indeed, it is within these moments of construction and deconstruction that one can see the relationship between Boepple’s graphic work and his sculptural practice. The play with colour and space is not confined to paper but reflects the process of making the print, the layering and emerging of colour and by extension seems to as well mirror the play of structure, colour and voids as seen in the artist’s sculptural forms. While of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Boepple’s work has a modernist classicism to it, the elegance of voids, of juxtaposition, the use of chance and repetition to create pure and beautiful formulas of structure, architecture and constellation.
Rosa JH Berland
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Willard Boepple in Conversation with Jo Baring
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THE ORDER OF PLAY
The rivetingly handsome, intriguing monoprints of Willard Boepple—streamlined and complex in equal measure—invite the imagination to play. And this website, far from merely documenting his ongoing achievements in printmaking, is an arena in which the pleasures of that game unfold. Teasing yet driven by their own logic, these images are inviting and aloof, sensual and cerebral, singular and serial. They are insistently flat and suggestively multidimensional.
Once we know that their author is a sculptor, and more particularly this sculptor, the prints make sense, both as an extension and a counterpoint to Boepple’s primary enterprise. A sculptor since the early 1970s and a novice in printmaking when he arrived at Print Studio in Cambridge, England in 2004, to work with master screenprinter Kip Gresham, Boepple’s first impulses in this graphic medium flowed from a series of sculptures he had recently been making, also in England, in resin. These played with the transparency and opacity of that medium accentuated through the stacking of elements. So, despite their insistent flatness and dependence on color, these are very much the prints of a sculptor. Forms engage the mind “in the round,” while these images also implicitly incorporate time. With the folding back and forth developed over the years in his screenprinted shape vocabulary—all that layering and pivoting—each print is a succession of planes.
Within a given series he selects a set of stenciled shapes, proceeding with a distinct color for each pull. Placement being constant, color choices have perceptually crucial implications. If shape is the vehicle in each series, one could say that color is the motor. And yet, despite the play of illusion, these prints also have the groundedness, stasis, and no-nonsense matter of fact-ness of sculpture. Surprises lie in the results, not in some mystery attending the process.
Each image implies temporal succession in the narrative of how its constituent structures and colors came together. And time is implicit in that sense the viewer has of walking around and into forms. But time also manifests in the bigger story of theme and variation, how each series is an elaboration of chromatic and spatial permutations.
Theoretically, the artist might have made any number of variants within a series—color interactions being open-ended in possibility. But once successful candidates have been selected and ordered, the completed sequence basks in the aura of a mathematical proof. Except that, for Boepple, music not math is the go-to paradigm for creativity and resolution. The way color literally changes shape in Boepple’s prints reminds us why metaphors of color (“the chromatic scale”) are so compelling to musicians. Boepple’s movement within a set has the intuited authority of musical composition. In his sculpture, the developmental algorithm is essentially musical: an idea takes shape, demands variation, asks questions, leaves the artist to wonder “what if?” It elaborates, exhausts itself, suggests a radical variant, segues into a new form, where the process starts again. Over the decades, in this way, Boepple has generated a roughly sequential oeuvre that divvies up into series whose names indicate his central concern with an abstracted sense of the body extending into familiar functions: ladders, looms, shelves, rooms, towers, trestles, and so on. These series have been years in the making, each sculpture very much an independent expression in its own right. Poetic, often humorous titles undermine overarching allegiance to a given series. In printmaking, roles are reversed and time speeds up. In each set, the originating structural idea is fixed: it is color that moves the idea along, takes line for a walk, messes with directions. There are occasional correspondences between print and sculpture series—pinwheels and temples, for instance—but in general, the prints are independent, and on an ideational fast track. The neutral efficiency of their numbered titles indicates that they are on a mission, tracks their development by date.
While color is important in Boepple’s sculpture, it is secondary to structure. Color is chosen as a rightful surface complement to what is happening three-dimensionally. The sculptures are, for the most part, monochromatic and color is neither symbolic nor referential. In the prints, color is fully equal with structure, perhaps even the privileged party. As the artist puts it, the structures are built with color. It is worth recalling the fact that Boepple’s first ambition and his studies were as a painter; he found his true calling through assisting established artists in the fabrication of their sculptures. He himself works through assistants, as he has been disabled since mid-career. This is significant in understanding the ease and fecundity of an artist who has taken so well to working in a print studio, producing one-off proofs in series, as collaboration and communication are axiomatic in his creative life.
The experience of seeing these prints reproduced online is markedly different from holding the actual pages in one’s hand, or seeing them framed on a wall. Despite high quality photography, we have to allow for the loss of physicality, the sumptuousness of the paper support, the actuality of ink sitting upon and soaking into page, and the delightful glitches and gremlins—little surface ticks—lovingly tolerated by the artist in what might appear, in reproduction, as a high purism of graphic abstraction. But the website offers a truly significant, unanticipated consolation prize, something not to be had in the “analogue” experience: Clicking quickly between images within a given series produces a virtual animation. The web visitor is treated to stop motion-like flights of fantasy as the fans and cogs and origami flip and twist themselves around, revealing new forms, and generating visual marvels in the space between impressions.
David Cohen
2018
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BIOGRAPHY
Boepple studied at the University of California at Berkeley and the Rhode Island School of Design and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He holds his BFA from City College of the City University of New York and has served as a faculty member at Bennington College and at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Special awards and honoursinclude National Academy Election, 2010 and Royal Society of British Sculptors, London Elected Fellow, 2001.
He serves on the boards of the National Academy of Design and the Vermont Studio Center.
In addition to an impressive exhibition record spanning over thirty years, the artist’s work is found in a number of key museum collections including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The National Gallery of Kenya, Nairobi and the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York among others.
Recent solo shows include:
Pamela Salisbury, Hudson New York, 2020
Reeves Contemporary, MASS MoCA Way, North Adams MA, 2018
FX Fowle Architects Gallery, New York, 2017
Broadbent Gallery, London, 2017
John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, 2016
Maddox Arts, London, 2015
Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, 2014 in conjunction with the launch of the Lund Humphries monograph, The Sense of Things: Willard Boepple Sculpture
Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, 2012
Johnson State College, Johnson, VT, 2012
Century Association, New York, 2010
Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, 2008-2009
Broadbent, London, 2007–08
Maiden Lane Exhibition Space, New York, 2007-2008
London Art Fair, 2006
Salander O'Reilly, New York, 2004
Broadbent, London, 2003 and 2001
Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton Four Corners, RI, 2001
Tricia Collins Contemporary Art, New York, 2000.
Select group shows include:
Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor, New York, 2018
Art 3, New York, 2017
Walpole, New Hampshire, 2016
National Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition, New York, 2015
Zurcher Gallery, New York, 2014
Freedman Art, New York, 2014
National Academy Museum, New York, 2014
Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, 2013-2011, 2009, 2007
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, 2013
The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, 2013
Poussin Gallery, London, 2011
Parker’s Box, Brooklyn, New York, 2010
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, 2011
Palitz Gallery, Syracuse University Lubin House, 2010.