Willard Boepple: Shards

23 July - 2 September 2023

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    Upsilon Gallery is pleased to present "Shards," a solo-artist OVR dedicated to American sculptor Willard Boepple. The exhibition gathers 7 wall sculptures produced by the artist between 2021-2022. Willard Boepple's "Shards" fuse two art forms, sculpture and monoprints, to make a third which is sui generis and yet partakes of both of the others.

  • Willard Boepple’s birthplace, Bennington, Vermont, became nationally renowned for the art department at its eponymous college. During the 1960s and...

    Willard Boepple

    Eleanor at 7:15 1977

    Cor-Ten steel

    49 x 35 x 45 in. (124.5 x 88.9 x 114.3 cm)

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

    Willard Boepple’s birthplace, Bennington, Vermont, became nationally renowned for the art department at its eponymous college. During the 1960s and '70s, the school attracted practitioners and theorists of abstract art, including the leading critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) and the British sculptor Anthony Caro (1924-2013). In 1977, after studying on both the East and the West Coasts, Boepple returned to Bennington where he worked closely with Caro as a technical assistant for sculpture. Caro was a master of improvisational composition using sheet metal, and Boepple adapted that technique to his own style. Though he often has a concept prior to beginning a new work, Boepple states: "Only rarely does the plan survive the making; more often the sculpture takes over, establishing its own rules, its own reality."

  • In the 1970s, Boepple preferred to work with Cor-ten steel, a strong yet malleable material that can be cut, bent, and formed to fabricate works with an extraordinary amount of energy and movement. Eleanor at 7:15 is a highly articulated, swirling mass of lively, spirited lines with intersecting curves and flat planes. Like many of Boepple’s sculptures, this particular piece is modest in scale and smaller than the average person. The artist feels that sculpture should not occupy its own isolated space because proximity allows for an immediate, more intimate exchange.


    While Eleanor at 7:15 resists a figurative interpretation, the title alludes to an intimate moment in the life of the artist. Boepple’s titles are not meant to be descriptions or explanations. They are inspired by places or poetry that evoke a feeling or gesture. With Eleanor at 7:15, Boepple envisioned a lively and energetic morning person. Aesthetically, the piece adheres to the formalist ideas that drove abstract sculpture at that time, when the context behind a work of art was secondary to purely visual aspects like form and style. Boepple breaks from this tradition by suggesting a narrative within the title.

  • Most intimately, the 'Shards' bear a relation to the intensely coloristic monotypes that Boepple has been making since roughly 2004...
    Willard Boepple, Green Ganesh, 2022
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    Most intimately, the "Shards" bear a relation to the intensely coloristic monotypes that Boepple has been making since roughly 2004 in collaboration - following his choices and decisions - with Kip Gresham, a master printmaker in Cambridge, England. As described by Karen Wilkin in her indispensable book on the artist:

    "Each shape goes down on the paper as an expanse of uninflected, transparent color, the shapes are determined by stencils prepared beforehand. As other shapes are added, the overlapping hues create new densities and new colors. Changing the sequence can further alter these tonal and chromatic relationships, creating new spatial suggestions, so that we read each of these unique images differently."

    • Willard Boepple, Big Left, 2022
      Willard Boepple, Big Left, 2022
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    • Willard Boepple, Candle Box, 2022
      Willard Boepple, Candle Box, 2022
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  • "New spatial suggestions" is right. In fact the monoprints, for all their coloristic brilliance, are manifestly the work of a sculptor as one tracks not just the interaction of the hues but also the sense of implied physical relationships among the different shapes - sometimes simply a matter of overlap, as if in a shallow three-dimensional space, but often something more, an implied continuity from one shape to the next, as if across a sharp spatial "fold." Put slightly differently, the pleasures the monoprints offer the viewer are structural as well as color-istic. It's a marker of Boepple's originality that, straight forward as they are, nothing quite like his monoprints have been seen before.

    • Willard Boepple, Vinyl 8, 2022
      Willard Boepple, Vinyl 8, 2022
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    • Willard Boepple, Vinyl 11, 2022
      Willard Boepple, Vinyl 11, 2022
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    • Willard Boepple, Shard 64, 2022
      Willard Boepple, Shard 64, 2022
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    • Willard Boepple, Tab 86, 2021
      Willard Boepple, Tab 86, 2021
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    To inquire about works by Willard Boepple, please email us at info@upsilongallery.com.