Willard Boepple - 9.6.16

  
Willard Boepple  

HIGHLIGHTS

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, permanent collection

Storm King Art Center, permanent collections
Metropolitan Museum of Art

National Academy of Arts and Letters

Mead Art Museum, Amherst College

Royal Academy of Arts, London
The German Embassy, London

Willard Boepple is an unabashed modernist: an innovator within a strong and defined sculptural tradition that renews itself through passion and surprise. The artist’s ambition makes sense of the strange mix of complexity and streamlining that characterizes his work. His aesthetic is refined, with an enormous emphasis on economy and restraint. He is not interested in reduction per se. In fact, the tighter the work, the more packed it is with formal intrigue. This is evident in the strong line and apperception of space demonstrated in his beautiful, dance-like sculptures.

Willard Boepple is deeply attuned to the shape of color. His sheer, skeletal sculptures, abstracted from their surroundings in emphatic though often offbeat monochromes accentuate the sensation of a succession of planes. His unique screenprints, published in cycles, are supremely, playfully dimensional, teasing different readings withing nested families of stenciled forms through intuitively progressive color variations. In what now seems the inevitable next step he has begun to produce printed sculpture. (David Cohen, Artcritical, 2017).

Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, VT in 1945 and currently splits his time between Vermont and New York City. He is represented in New York, London, and New England. His work is included in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville; and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, among others. He was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York in 2010 and his work was included in their 2015 invitational exhibition.