Willard Boepple

New Sculpture

14 March - 26 April 2008

Go to Boepple Homepage

Here & Now, 37 x 23 x 23in, 2006, poplar

When I was trudging home with a load of groceries, and needed to cheer up, I used to walk past the large foyer of a famous city law firm where one of Willard Boepple’s sculptures of 1990 was sited. The piece has been sold again, alas. I would look at it through the floor to ceiling windows that let in a lot of light. I had to stay outside. Security is tight in the city. Guards are rightly nervous.

Across the Thames, at the Tate’s Turbine Hall, the artists who have so far shown there feel they should vie with the hall’s sheer size, big against big. Small as the law firm’s lobby is compared with the massive Tate, it is still generous enough to have made Boepple’s sculpture seem, in one respect, petite and delicate.

Coll, 22 x 21.5 x 19in, 2006, poplar

And yet this modestly scaled work energised the entire space. The piece has no bulk or core. Its vocabulary is a few lengths of 2 x 1 inch steel, all straight except for one slight curve. They make a kind of ghost of a step ladder, broken up and re-arranged just enough to stand. The feeling of imminent collapse is crucial, making the structure seem to dance. The leaning but not falling sensation reminds me of Rubens’ full length “Hélène Fourment” in the Munich Alte Pinakothek. The sitter and her chair slope dramatically to the viewer’s left. There is a counter movement in the background drapery, shooting off to the upper right. A straight up and down architectural staffage plays against all these diagonals, making looking at the painting akin to being in a boat rocking at a dockside. The result is visually thrilling and so is Boepple's piece.

The difference between Boepple’s sculpture and work in the Turbine Hall lies not so much in scale as intensity. Boepple’s achievement has more concentration and depth. His way of working leads him there.

Irish Corners, 25 x 29 x 19in, 2007, aluminium

It is good fun seeing artists grapple with the novelty of such a huge space as the Tate’s. But so far everyone has been content with a kind of surrogate sculpture. No one has yet managed to go beyond what is really stage design.

Not that sculpture and stage design have never tangled before: Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St Theresa,” for example. The ecstatic saint is in the throes of spiritual marriage. Enhancing the fictive radiance of the gilded metal rays round this event, actual daylight pours down on her from glazing hidden from the viewer. In opera boxes on either side, watching the drama, are the sculpted donors, discussing what they are witnessing. The arrangement lacks only actual movement to be pure puppet theatre, yet it still feels like sculpture.

Uist, 2006, poplar, 23 x 22 x 19in

In fairness it must be added that when she showed in the Turbine Hall, Louise Bourgeois did not give in to stagecraft. But her giant spider has too much of the doodle about it. It shares the visual flabbiness of a pantomime prop. From the Willendorf “Venus” to David Smith’s “Zig IV”, I have never seen a first rate sculpture that did not involve good drawing, the kind that is inextricable from the forming. The drawing in Bourgeois’s spider lets it down – and I do not mean, of course, its arachnid inaccuracy. Compare it with, say, Miró’s large scale public sculptures and you will see what I mean. The Spaniard’s drawing may look merely spontaneous and slight but it is in reality, strong, inspired and knowing.

If I seem to have left my subject, Boepple’s sculpture, behind, it is because I must confront the unprecedentedly huge promotional blather that now accompanies sculpture, indeed art in general. Only after that can I put Boepple’s work in the context it deserves: that is, among the very best being done at the moment. Do not assume that because it is quiet and never succumbs to the grand manner, it is therefore not in the first rank.

Charlotte, 2004-06, poplar, 15 x 20 x 20in

I first saw his work in the early 1970s. There was one that got its start from looking at an old barrel outside his studio in the Vermont countryside. The vessel was on its side and falling to pieces, hoops parting from staves, opening out the dark interior but not so much as to lose the sense of an inside and outside. Boepple’s transcendent art made music of the rotting pile and he is still working that way. “I am trying to build my sculptures using objects that the body uses, objects whose form is determined by the body’s use of them,” he wrote in a recent catalogue.

When the parts of his works and the spaces they make, coalesce, they seem to resonate as a chord does in the ear. It is then you know you are experiencing sculpture at its most profound.

John McLean 2008

Room 3, 2003, aluminium, 96 x 96 x 96in

Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, Vermont in 1945. He attended University of California at Berkeley from 1963-1964 and then went onto the Rhode Island School of Design. He obtained a B.F.A. from the City College of the City University of New York in 1968. Boepple lives and works in New York, Vermont and London.