Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, Vermont, in 1945. He studied at Skowhegan School of Painting (1963), the University of California at Berkeley (1963-64), Rhode Island School of Design (1997) and 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 Arts Boston, Massachusetts, from 1977 to 1987. Boepple now lives and works in New York City.
Boepple is influenced by commonplace functional objects that the body uses. He uses these references as the foundational structure to many of his sculptures. He is concerned with the paradoxical ontology of what it is to be human, and by removing figurative representation and creating new reinvented configurations that are suggestive of objects affiliated with human interaction Boepple questions what it means to be human.
He often draws on minimalism, which he greatly admires for its radical departure from history through absolute geometry. By commenting on the body and the objects it uses, Boepple inherently deals with the constructed world around us. By using familiar human tropes, associated with the everyday such as tables and chairs Boepple activates our associative visual vocabulary but also creates new imaginative configurations of form and matter that are elegantly direct.
