Willard Boepple Sculpture: The Sense of Things surveys the mature work of one of the most original and compelling abstract sculptors working today. The art Boepple has produced since the 1970s focuses on corporeal proportions and allusions, evoking the human body metaphorically rather than via direct figuration.
This, the first monograph on Willard Boepple, locates the artist's work within the context of modernist constructed sculpture. It pays particular attention to Boepple's chosen ancestors and sources and his relationship with his peers, in order to emphasize the originality of his sculpture. An in-depth, illustrated exploration of Boepple's most achieved abstract sculptures in various media and scales, from the 1980s to the present, is complemented by discussion of pivotal earlier works and a recent series of monoprints, highlighting the persistence of particular themes and motifs and the full, broad range of Boepple's artistic concerns.
About the Author: Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and art critic based in New York. A specialist in 20th-century modernism, she has written monographs on David Smith, Anthony Caro, Stuart Davis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Isaac Witkin, and Hans Hofmann and organized exhibitions of their work internationally. Wilkin is the Contributing Editor for Art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion and the Wall Street Journal. Her book Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior was published by Lund Humphries in 2011 and she was the overall editor of the series of 5 volumes published by Lund Humphries on Caro's work.
Michael Fried is an art historian and critic. He has written extensively about abstract painting and sculpture since the Second World War, but his specialist knowledge also encompasses Italian painting in the 16th and 17th centuries, contemporary 'art' photography and theories of theatricality and objecthood. He is J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities at John Hopkins University.
The release of this monograph will coincide with the exhibition Willard Boepple: Sculpture at Lori Bookstein Fine Art. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the gallery. They are also available on Ashgate.com.