Willard Boepple

Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, Vermont, in 1945 and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting (1963), the University of California at Berkeley (1963-64), Rhode Island School of Design (1997) and City College of the City University of New York (1968). He was technical assistant at Bennington College (1969-73) and on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts, from 1977 to 1987. Boepple's first solo exhibition was at the McCullough Park Foundation, North Bennington, Vermont, in 1971, since when he has had one-man shows at many venues in America and London and featured in group exhibitions internationally, including the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Harare in August 1988, following a period at the renowned Pachi Pamwe Workshop for sculpture. Boepple was supported by the British Council as a US participant in the Africa 95 International Sculpture Workshop at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1995 and over the past few years has worked extensively in England.

Willard Boepple appropriates commonplace things around which to build ideas for his work - things the body uses, he says. He transforms his observations into sculptures that are metaphors for what it is to be human and which are as complex and contradictory as mankind itself. 'Abstract sculpture', he has said, 'removed itself from the figure via the Minimalists. It was such an extreme step. They solved the problem with absolute geometry. By getting back to what the body uses, I can deal with the world we build around us - things like tables and chairs that are part of our visual vocabulary'. With this in mind, he creates works that are elegantly direct.