Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce "Looms," a recent body of work by Willard Boepple. The looms, a series of highly linear, roughly rectangular sculptures made of aluminum, explore the contrast between the rigidity and precision of the works' material construction with the visual fluidity produced by their crisscrossing structures.
Within a box-like frame which loosely recalls the dimensions of a free-standing loom, rods of varying lengths and proportions abut and intersect like an oversized game of pick-up sticks. Capitalizing on the play of negative spaces, the sculptures delineate space within and around them, and are charged by the internal tension of the transverse rods. The pieces are an exercise in contraction versus expansion, and interior versus exterior—depending on the density of the constructive components, they can take on the aspect of a window, or a screen.
The distinct personality of each loom—some are characterized by sleek, acute angles, others by their block-like forms—produce rhythms of varying speeds and intensity. To consider them on the whole challenges the eye as it scans back and forth to make sense of them, but no single resting place becomes dominant over another. Within these deliberately, beautifully built constructions, a tremendous energy and movement seems to preclude a definitive resolution between the interplay of substance and emptiness, stability and mobility.
While not quite large enough to connote an architectural encounter, the looms belie their status as objects. They are too hefty to be easily managed by one person; nonetheless, they are displayed on table-like pedestals.
Throughout his career, Boepple has found inspiration in objects and spaces to which the human body relates—but despite the designation "loom," the works in the exhibition are resolutely abstract. We may read in them certain mechanical or vaguely utilitarian qualities, but it is purely up to the viewer to guess what these might be.
In addition to the sculptures in the exhibition, a new body of serial monoprints by the artist will be on view. The monoprints are based on his resin sculptures. Working in reverse of convention, Boepple produced them after the sculptures had been conceived and uses them to extend and manipulate his formal vocabulary rather than to originate it.
Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, Vermont in 1945, but grew up in Berkeley, California. He studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1963), the University of California at Berkeley (1963-64), RISD (1967) and CUNY City College (1968). After teaching at Bennington College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he returned to New York, where he has lived for over twenty years. He has exhibited widely here and abroad, at galleries including Acquavella, André Emmerich, Tricia Collins and Broadbent Gallery, London. His work belongs to such noted institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Storm King Art Center. In 1987, Boepple began participating in the Triangle Artists' Workshop, an artist residency program which he has helped replicate in countries all over the world.
