Collection: Willard Boepple

Willard Boepple (born 1944, New York) is an American sculptor whose practice has developed over five decades through a sustained engagement with structure, material and the logic of familiar objects. Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Boepple worked closely with Anthony Caro and later taught at Bennington College in Vermont, where he was part of a generation of sculptors working in the tradition of constructed, abstract, non-representational form.

Boepple’s sculpture begins repeatedly with structures associated with use — shelves, ladders, looms, trestles, towers, rooms — and subjects them to a process of reduction and reorganisation. Working in wood, resin, aluminium and steel, he retains the proportions of furniture or architecture without allowing the work to settle into either category. The result is a body of sculpture that is simultaneously legible and displaced: recognisable in its references, but operating at a remove from function.

He exhibited regularly with Broadbent Gallery in London from 2001, with solo presentations in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2008, and with Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York. Publications produced in connection with these exhibitions — catalogues, checklists, and printed matter — document a practice that has remained consistently attentive to the relationship between object, space and the conditions of display.