March 30 to May 15, 2016
291 Grand Street, between Eldridge and Allen streets
New York City, (212) 563-7821

In an early episode in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the novella’s quixotic antihero, Frenhofer, is adding masterful corrective touches to a painting by Porbus for the benefit of the narrator, the young Poussin. “Look my boy, it is only the last stroke of the brush that counts; no one will thank us for what is underneath.” The history of modern art, it could be argued, is a riposte to such certitude. Abstraction, while often making the contradictory assertion that what you see is what you get — that the surface, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, is to be penetrated at peril — actually trades quite aggressively in the values that have been circumscribed. Heroics of elimination and purification might be intimated physically in the form of pentimenti; or else, in works that achieve non plus ultra reductivism, they are conceptually implicit.

Beguiling, enticing even, as the paintings of Nathlie Provosty are, it took this viewer three visits to be convinced by the totality of the artist’s vision. On the first visit, a troika of large, dark canvases, each seven feet high, dominated this sumptuously austere gallery space: West, Gilles and Twice Six (all works cited, 2016). Their declarative restraint established pictorial subtleties with such calm authority that the scattered smaller canvases seemed like intrusive souvenirs or afterthoughts. On a second visit, however, taking on trust the monumental severity of the big three, the eye could adjust to the busier, tightly knotted smaller compositions. These seemed to apply the lessons of their larger counterparts — or, one could equally say, anticipated the breakthroughs, for why assume that less always follows more? Inevitably, the fuller lexicon of colors and textures in the smaller works eclipsed what might seem like neat contained solutions in the bigger ones. But the experience of both visits yielded such satisfactions as to demand a third, which in turn rewarded this devotee with a sense of synthesis. Degrees of reduction or addition seemed determined in each canvas by particularities of emotional ambition rather than mere strategies dictated by size.

The three larger paintings each present a U-shaped black form in glossy application against a matt ground of similar hue. As befits paintings that glide effortlessly over the retina yet draw the viewer back again, the shapes variously resemble a boomerang and a magnet. If the initial impression, from a distance, of black shape against black ground, might recall the reductive late paintings of Alberto Burri in Celotex, that was belied, on closer inspection, by Provosty’s subtleties of texture and composition. Process in these “black” paintings hovers between deletion and accretion. The eye quickly becomes attuned to the survival of obscured, subcutaneous shapes and zones, and indeed colors, without compromising the surface’s serenely achieved sheerness. In this respect, the enigmatic black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, with their cruciform substructures, inevitably come to mind, as do the contingent emerging complexity of Suzan Frecon’s irregular geometries. In Provosty’s case, in counterpoint to the play of glossy bent shape against allover matt ground, an off-kilter vertical axis serves to further destabilize monochrome finality, adding uneven slivers of exposed canvas to outer edges of the rectangle to give resulting shape to what would otherwise have been merely accepted as a given, a field. These are complicatedly simple pictures.

The smaller paintings could equally be viewed, therefore, as models or as elaborations; as studies or as clarifications. Their titles intimate states of contrast in relationship to each other: “Assonance,” “Dissonance,” “Consonance,” “Resonance.” The dislodging of the bisected rectangle (now on both axes) and the misregistration of its segments is more explicit — perhaps, indeed, axiomatic — than in the three big paintings. The coloring of different shapes, and more crucially the contrasts in tone of shapes of the same color caught in axial division, offer clues about what lies beneath that tarmac-like top coat in the “black” trio, or what could result from the evisceration of that surface. Tight busyness results, paradoxically, in greater legibility, although that can be questioned if what the viewer ends up reading was unintentional. In Consonance II, for instance, tapering shapes that could signify shading add the illusion of pictorial depth to an upside-down magnet shape; in Assonance, the fractionally dislocated curves assume a marching limb schematic (bringing to mind Don Voisine and the prints of Willard Boepple).

Ultimately, it is hard to say which body of work is richer. The smaller works are more traditional in their density and the larger ones more modernist in their singularity — they seem, respectively, to evoke avant-garde (pre-war) and institutional (post-war) phases in the history of abstraction. If so, it is the dynamic of the relationship of the two that makes this striking exhibition feel relevant in a moment where Provosty’s peers amongst younger abstract painters are too often driven towards the extremes of rhetorical neo-formalist statement and intentionally irresolvable open-endedness.

The post Thank You For What Is Underneath, Nathlie Provosty appeared first on artcritical.

The Surrealists had a fabulous notion of a secret corridor that could take you right through Paris, from building to building, without encumbering itself with the street. In a way, New York has its own corporate version of that fantasy: the lobbies of trading towers that, whether through altruism or planning obligation, the public is entitled to traverse. One curatorially-inclined causeway is Tower 49 Gallery, comprising the lobby, sky lobby (stunning bird’s eyes of the Rockefeller Center by the way) and exterior spaces of 12 East 49th Street, a recently upgraded 1980s tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the Kato International portfolio. Its exhibition program, directed by Ms. Ai Kato, currently features the stunningly installed “Bennington Legacy: Sculpture by Willard Boepple, Isaac Witkin and James Wolfe”. As guest curator Karen Wilkin explains in an accompanying catalogue, Bennington – both town and gown – formed a nexus of sculptural experimentation for several generations: both Wolfe and Boepple (who was actually born in Bennington) served as assistants to South African native Witkin.  Witkin’s sole work on view is his magnificent Shogun, 1968, a welded steel sculpture placed outside the glass and steel building. The sculpture is as solid and flexible as you’d expect a warrior to be: the squat ziggurat to the right feels like it could fold and store in the half-section of cone to the left in a feat of origami.

The Bennington Legacy remains on view through October 29 at 12 East 49th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenue, open weekdays 9am to 6pm

The post The Bennington Legacy: Willard Boepple, Isaac Witkin and James Wolfe appeared first on artcritical.

Clive Hodgson, 2012
Piri Halasz, 2008
David Cohen, 2008
Eric Gelber, 2006
Maureen Mullarkey, 2004
David Cohen, 2004

More information on the artist can be found at Lori Bookstein Fine Art

Full index entry for “Boepple” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical 

The post Willard Boepple at artcritical appeared first on artcritical.

March 29 to April 28, 2012
138 Tenth Avenue between 19th and 20th streets
New York City, 212.750.0949

Willard Boepple has a knack of keeping us at a threshold where a sense of something familiar and utilitarian slides away into mysterious relationships of planes, spaces and colors. In terms of the familiar or the useful he gives us few clues.  The three looming structures in his present show, sparsely and handsomely installed in the main gallery space at Lori Bookstein, make possible reference to radio masts, pylons, towers etc, in much the way previous bodies of work were titled, and related to, ‘Looms’ or ‘Rooms.’ But these apparent references don’t take us far. As for the mystery of planes, spaces, color, rhythm, structure etc, we are faced with a problem – we don’t have much of a language for it, and yet it is clear that this is the real content of the work. It is easier to think about the radio mast as an object because it has a name and a function whereas the sculptures turn us away from this towards that which we know much less about; our more instinctive and unmediated responses to such phenomena as weight, density and scale.

The installation is generous in allowing us to walk around in between the sculptures, to back off to some distance and see them against the plain while of the gallery walls.  There is an invitation to speculate, and to pass in, out and around the works repeatedly, noting differences and similarities. What gives (2011) holds within its slightly tapering vertical grey frame, red panels or blocks, while Heath (2012) has a darker gray frame, and contains more slender, dark gray bars. Ever (2012) has a paler frame and even more attenuated climbing (or falling) bars in it. In each piece rhythms and weights are uneven within the regularity of the tall frame, but each sculpture has these two fundamental elements in dialogue, the frame and the forms that are placed within it. Musical references have been used to describe this sculptor’s work, and Boepple himself says that he wants his work “to be open and clear like a ringing melody”. Here, and in earlier series, one can also think of themes and variations – there is something quite methodical as well as intuitive about the way ideas are explored within a repeated framework. Each piece is a conclusion but also contains the idea of variability and movement.

The way each piece has a more or less gray frame that contains elements of a different second colour emphasises the distinction between frame  and elements and also stresses each piece’s individuality.  This simple color coding tells us something about the order of apprehension; first, the single identity of the sculpture (the red one, the yellow one, etc) then, the separateness of its two elements: the framework and its contents. However, the coloring also unites the pieces in a painterly way (there isn’t a sculpture where one element is painted and the other isn’t). The natural connection one makes is to Mondrian’s lines, or strips, of various dark greys, that hold in place areas of color– a framework that is itself an active component. The artist says of these towers that “eventually the framework began to function as a sort of engaged pedestal, a part of and support for the whole”. There is also a kind of freedom in the coloring that I take to be simply pleasurable, which relates to the musicality of the ideas of variation and rhythm, and I think one shouldn’t underestimate the sense of enjoyment of colour, surface, facture and so on, that the works seem to advocate. It is the pleasure of apparently simple things that very rapidly become complex and unfathomable.

Boepple’s work repeatedly stresses that we can see through it, that its space is also part of our space. I don’t know of a completely solid Boepple.  The densest sculptures of his that I know, the ‘Temples’, still have gaps between the elements that form their relatively compacted and heavy blocks, and the more sealed up forms of the resin pieces were made sufficiently transparent to see their interior. Other series are typically open and airy, especially so these towers. They retain the idea that the sculpture holds, or makes or divides spaces within it and around it.  The gaps and openness in his work suggest that he wants his sculpture to be contiguous with rather than separate from the ‘normal’ space and character of the world we inhabit. The Towers presumably reference the ethereal space of radio waves, unknowable to us but for the mediation of a mechanism. This is a nice metaphor for the functioning of Boepple’s sculptures: mechanisms that make apparent mysterious qualities that surround us.

The post Mechanisms of Mediation: Willard Boepple’s Towers appeared first on artcritical.

Prior to this exhibition, Willard Boepple’s most recent New York appearance was last winter at Francis J. Greenberger’s Maiden Lane Exhibition Space. There, two of the artist’s well-known “Room” sculptures were on view. I remarked upon their resemblance to architecture, if a fantasy form of it, and even in retrospect, find myself thinking in architectural terms: these “rooms” resembled nothing so much as the skeleton of a classic post-and-beam type of house under construction, before the exterior and interior sidings are added. In retrospect, however, another analogy also haunts me: I’m reminded of Alberto Giacometti’s famous small surrealist house-like construction, The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932–33).The Bookstein show differs from the Maiden Lane one in that the basic thrust of these new sculptures is horizontal and not vertical, rectangular skeletonic forms that sit on small pedestals. Yet, oddly, they still remind me of another equally surrealistic Giacometti sculpture, Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object)(1934). This is not because I see any direct resemblance between this piece and Boepple’s “looms,” but partially because all are concerned with the concept of delineating space, and partially because of the spirit that animates them.

It would surprise me if Boepple were to call himself a surrealist. His background is impeccably modernist, even to having been born and raised in Bennington, VT, where Helen Frankenthaler went to college, Jules Olitski taught and Kenneth Noland lived. He learned a lot from looking at David Smith’s sculpture, and at a certain moment, felt the need to escape the aura of Anthony Caro (a feat long since accomplished). Yet there is still that vein of feeling which reminds me of what I learned from the first exhibition staged at the Museum of Modern Art by William Rubin, longtime chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. The show (in 1968) was “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” and it featured transitional works by Pollock, Rothko, Newman and several other abstract expressionists, from when they were still in their youthful surrealist phases.

Rubin argued that these abstract expressionists, even after they achieved their mature work, still retained the “peinture-poésie” of the surrealists. “While it is true,” he wrote “that they expunged the quasi-literary imagery that had earlier related their paintings to Surrealism, the visionary spirit of their wholly abstract art retained much of Surrealism’s concern with poetry albeit in a less obvious form.” Though Rubin didn’t say so, the work of abstract expressionists like Franz Kline and Bradley Walker Tomlin, who didn’t go through a surrealist phase, is wooden by comparison, and I’d make much the same comparison between Boepple and some of our leading minimalists. Somehow, the “peinture-poésie” of the surrealists has descended through David Smith (as well as the painters of his generation) to Boepple, and lends his work a gracefulness, subtlety, complexity and vitality that I too often look for in vain.

To Boepple, the sculptures at Lori Bookstein resemble looms, and he’s named them after various British textile centers, but being abstract, they’re also richly ambiguous, suggesting other horizontal skeletal structures as well: chicken coops, for example, or orange crates, symbolic of farmland and transport as well as North Country industry. As they’re all different, they evoke individual associations as well. Burnley, for example, made of rust-colored poplar beams, has lots of long diagonals and narrow crisscrossing shapes, reminiscent of the “cat’s cradles” I used to make as a child with string. Preston, a stocky piece made with bright yellow poplar beams, mysteriously bears a charming resemblance to a baby’s crib. Blackburn, most serene yet strangely crisp, is all horizontals and verticals, a severe aluminum presence that looks dark gray (though I understand that it’s really a very dark green).  Somewhat incongruously, it suggests the bleachers in a ball park, or an open toolbox – yet remains the most impressive piece in a very impressive show.

The post Willard Boepple: Looms at Lori Bookstein Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.

Willard Boepple: Looms opens tonight at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 37 West 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212 750 0949 through January 3, 2009

When you call the form or genre that Willard Boepple is currently working through a “structure” you find the word resonating at many levels, whether physical, social or linguistic.  His latest series, which he calls “looms,” are skeletal, with every bar and support forced to pull its weight in the taut aesthetic engineering.  And as with the ladders, the shelves, and the rooms that have been past ciphers of his sculptural obsession, he has once again hit on a form that touches, and then elaborates, the lived and breathed experience of the socially interactive body.

This was an artcritical CAPSULE in November 2008.

The post Willard Boepple at Lori Bookstein Fine Art appeared first on artcritical.

October 26 to December 9, 2006

The ten sculptures in this exhibition have contrasting formal qualities, simple and direct exteriors or frameworks, which are cylindrical, rectilinear, or box-like, utilitarian and other, and variegated interiors, with shifting planes and interstices. Unless you have perfect visual recall, viewing them from multiple angles will not lead to an immediate comprehension of the whole. Each time you reposition yourself around or to the sides of these sculptures some new detail or relationship materializes.

Initially, they look like four legged tables, standing or prone rectangles, speaker cabinets or end tables, but their utilitarian qualities disappear on closer inspection. Boepple generates confusion by luring the viewer’s gaze into the compact and elusive spaces in the center of his sculptures and eliminating all obvious entry points for the viewer’s gaze. We are forced into a phenomenological event, where our comprehension of the whole has to be pieced together and we become aware of the act of constructing the whole in our minds. Everything fits together in a very complicated way and it takes time to figure out how it is all integrated.

The translucency of the five resin sculptures in this exhibition is essential to their meaning. They take the tension generated by the poplar sculptures, which relates to the viewer’s gaze being unable to touch or physically enter the interior spaces we can see between the asymmetrically placed rectangular pieces of wood, to a new level. Like the wood sculptures we are meant to look into them. The indentations in such cylindrical sculptures as “Ways and Means” (2002) and “Gearless” (2002) become embedded dark lines when we look at the sculptures from the sides. The relationship between these embedded lines and the protuberances and recessions visible on the exteriors of the sculptures, becomes unclear. The level of opacity and translucency of the resin is smartly determined so that the lines we see within the material are distorted the way objects seen beneath water are.

These ten sculptures are not pictorial, narrative based, or metaphorical. Their cold formalism is undermined by their intimate scale. They intensify the act of looking and reward the viewer who tries to understand their complexity and the ways they divide and synthesize framed or embedded spaces which are aloof from the world around them.

A version of this review first appeared in the New York Sun, November 30, 2006

The post Willard Boepple: Resin, Paper and Wood appeared first on artcritical.

“brush, pencil, chisel, knife”
511 Gallery, 511 West 25 Street (212.255.2885).

Industrial Beauty
George Billis Gallery, 511 West 25th Street (212.645.2621).

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration
Axel Raben Gallery, 526 West 26 Street, (212.647.9064).

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions
George Adams Gallery, 41 West 57 Street, 212.644.5665).

Versions of these reviews originally appearedThe New York Sun on Thursday, July 22 and Thursday, July 29, 2004

Willard Boepple: Sculpture

Willard Boepple is a sculptor whose vocabulary draws from the look and language of architecture. Architecture is a social art, a reflective instrument of the society for which it builds. Any sculpture that aggressively refers to it, leaning on the prestige of the architect’s craft, makes itself vulnerable to distinctions between the communal aims of architecture and the more individualistic ones of fine art. It risks the charge of mimicry, which is what remains once structural complexity, weight-bearing concerns and purposes of shelter and assembly are removed.“Room” (2000) is a nine foot high skeletal house-shape in patinated aluminum. Light on its feet and open like a trellis, each of its four sides resembles the leading of Frank Lloyd Wright’s characteristic stained glass windows. Here are the same closely paired verticals on each side of a broader rectangle, joined at intervals by short parallel bars. Where quadrangles of colored glass might be, Mr. Boepple drops aluminum panels perpendicular to their posts to serve as shelving.

Viewers are likely to wonder where on the lawn this shining gazebo would show to best effect. Seen straight, unfiltered through the lens of stylish discourse, it is unmistakably an upmarket garden folly. Picture it covered with wisteria vines, shelves stocked with dahlias and wild strawberries in Italian pots. Yes, I know the thought is inadmissible “in the ateliers of any pedantic fine art,” to use Wright’s phrase; and it is hardly what Mr. Boepple intended. But what an artist intends and what he achieves are not identical. It is a fallacy to confuse them.Mr. Boepple’s three dense, painted poplar “temples”, each from 2003, suggest compressed tabletop rearrangements of David Smith’s rectangular forms for “Cubi IX” (1961). Anyone interested in modern sculpture will be reminded also of the cubical variations of Jacques Schnier and Hans Aeschenbacher from the same period.

Designated as temples, Mr. Boepple’s block configurations assert kinship with the ancient megaron, precursor to Doric structures. (The megaron informs Wright’s Unity Church, which he referred to as a temple.) But Mr. Boepple’s suppressed entrances do not lead to any interior sanctum; they go clear through to the other side. Sacred space is displaced by a box puzzle, a simplified maze that exposes its own blind alley. If you rest a drink on top, no deities will be offended.

brush, pencil, chisel, knife”

511 Gallery (formerly Miller/Geisler) celebrates its name change with a group show of 13 of its artists. The exhibition is ambitious, aspiring to stretch common understanding of what constitutes painting and sculpture. It promises art that moves beyond crusty constraints to become more elastic in definition.

Lurking here is the assumption that tradition is an antique, like the stiffened antimacassar on the back of great-grandpa’s chair. It is an attitude aimed at audiences who comprehend tradition as a reiteration of the past rather than an inheritance to be interpreted by each generation for its own purposes.

511 showcases the fruits of that mistake. Post-industrial folk art is the reigning genre. Unlike the pre-industrial kind, made by untrained individuals, the post variant is a mass product forged in an art school vernacular. Outsider art is now insider art, a reversal enabled by pundits, promoters and academics for whom artwork exists as a mere incident en route to the commentary.

Jennifer Odem dyes a cheap crocheted table cloth red, soaks it in acrylic medium, then flops it on the floor to set. Ed Fraga takes the votive path with “Cathedral” ( 2001), a crude plywood construction that cobbles a headless Christmas ornament with a tiny landscape cut to the shape of a palladium window. Epoxy is his crucial medium. Matt Ernst’s series of small “Guideboats” (2002) gives a good imitation of the sort of thing children carry home from camp. Mark Cooper’s “Endless Column” (2002) is a roadside totem, cousin to ones that appear along the East River Drive under the overpass to the Triborough Bridge.

The most persuasive works are by those artists who are not straining for a style. Bryan Le Boeuf’s “Trois Bateaux” (2004), the centerpiece of his recent solo show, gives evidence of maturing to certain artistic convictions, something quite different from style. He combines sympathy for the human figure with a quirky, mildly surreal compositional wit. Watch to see where he takes it.

Sculptor Mark Mennin is similarly satisfying, mindful of the traditions of his craft. His single, small marble “Head” (2003) is a finely worked mask of a fleshy, homely male elevated by materials to a solemnity the model might lack in life. It projects from the wall at a slight angle, reminiscent of medieval gargoyles or a portrait head from the sedilia in Westminster Abbey.

Popular appreciation of landscape hinges on the romance of a good view. By contrast, the scenery of urban infrastructures—the natural setting of urban artists—is more challenging.

Even middling painters can produce attractive pictures of beautiful places. It takes more robust sensibilities to seek order and grace in city sights readily ignored. Easy pleasure is not available. Viewers are on their own to discover the emotional keynote to scenes that have nothing picturesque about them.

Industrial Beauty

“Industrial Beauty” exhibits cityscape paintings and drawings by 24 artists. So much intelligent work is here that there is not enough column space to give it its due. Let me start with Stephen Hicks who impresses with the beauty of his paint handling and the vigor of his perceptions. He brings emotional depth to ordinary street corners and mobile homes. Pitch-perfect color and careful drawing, disguised by the fluidity of his paint, elevate these small paintings above the random realities they depict.

Elizabeth O’Reilly draws magic out of the 3rd Street Bridge and derelict buildings on the Gowanus Canal. True as her paintings are to their locations in and around Red Hook, they serve as microcosms of the effects of modernity on the outer boroughs of every city. She shares with Mr. Hicks a lively brush and an optimism toward her subjects. Nicholas Evans-Cato’s wide-angled “Panorama” (2003) captures the atmospheric damp of rain-washed streets. Shadowless gray light, cool tonalities, gleaming puddles and sweep of space evoke Gustave Caillabotte’s Paris on a rainy day.

Ron Milewicz’ “Court House Square” (2003) is a coloristic tour de force, subordinating naturalism to the geometric structures of his motif and a high-keyed palette. The Citicorp building in Long Island City looks glorious in yellow. Geometry is also the hallmark of Rick Dula’s imposing cement factory, mathematical clarity of form taking precedence over subjective sensations.

Andrew Lenaghan negotiates the complexity and visual clutter of urban scenes with an ease of concentration that reminds me of Antonio Lopez-García’s great views of Madrid. So much is depicted, you barely notice how much is merely indicated or left out. Sudden touches of subtle color move the eye around the canvas; smooth surfaces belie the actual density of his paint.

Lois Dodd’s characteristic insouciance lends a hint of whimsy to factories in Jersey City. Richard Orient’s Long Island fish hatchery is touched with the same melancholy that informs rural barns. Thomas Connelly reveals the controlled order of a loading dock; his nightscape of a commercial lot is a harmony of brooding tones.

Diana Horowitz’ courtesy toward the man-made landscape is a constant pleasure. So is the work is Roland Kulla, Stephen Magsig, Constance La Palombara, Andrew Haines, Stanley Goldstein and others here.

Apart from Ms. Dodd, the show contains few names known outside New York painting circles. If celebrity is your guide to quality, you might as well catch the next Hampton jitney. But anyone with eyes will be glad to have seen this show.

Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration

Collaboration in the arts has a long tradition; and pooling skills to extend the range of individual talent is a worthy activity. So I had hopes for this show.

I should have known better. Unlike the anonymous cooperation of the old workshop system, contemporary couplings exist to produce a two-headed prima donna. In Axel Raben’s exhibition of nine artist pairs, art work takes a rear seat to the synthetic dyads which are the true artifacts. Viewers are thrown into the faithless arms of the press release for guidance.

David Humphrey & Jennifer Coates have a game going: one suggests a subject; the other draws it. Thus, a “composite authorial self” is created. Drawings include a bare-bottomed Santa squatting to pass snowflakes; a cartoon cat biting a bunny beside a plateful of maggots. In this way “habits are disabled, inhibitions are dissolved … and skill-shortcomings encouraged.” Precisely.

Laura Lisbon & Suzanne Silver investigate “the mutual interference of layered mark-making.” They take turns scribbling on legal paper and post-it notes with colored pencil, likening their process to the Talmud (compiled over centuries by multiple commentators). To support their self-assessment, they exhibit their email correspondence, a text inclining to the grand.

Creighton Michaels, an otherwise attractive abstract painter, foregoes painting here for a conceptual gig. He inserts twig-like dowels individually into the wall, creating visual patterns similar to those in a kid’s book of mazes. Mr. Michaels’ installation is lit, sort of, by James Clark’s fluorescent bulbs in plastic bags. Bulbs are spotted with thumb prints, like a perp sheet. Team effort is deemed “an environment … a land of a thousand dances.”

Craig & Sean Miller provide handmade miniature shipping crates topped by a doll house gallery exhibiting a nano-sample of another artist’s work. These may be interpreted as “sculptures, performance pieces or a group portrait of contemporary art practice.” Unless a crate is just a crate.

The unspoken aim of all this conspicuous mutuality is to demonstrate that the artists make the grade as intellectuals. Art making is largely a platform for self-centered egos; the work of hands is a minor interest.

Joan Brown: Painted Constructions

Joan Brown ‘s work was a fey offspring of Bay Area figuration and funk art. Making and breaking rules to suit herself, she could be exasperating but she never bored.

On view at George Adams are works from the early 70’s: cardboard sculptures (begun in her kitchen from household materials while her studio was under renovation); a metal cutout; and large-scale paintings and drawings.

The more distant the post-60’s counter culture becomes, the more the paintings recede into the era and movements that generated them. But the constructions, rarely exhibited in her lifetime (1938-90), convey in full Ms. Brown’s distinctive inventiveness and humor. The fun of their making is still there to be seen.

Assembled here for the first time as a body of work, the constructions articulate a nimble faux-naif sophistication that survives the tropes of their times. Cutout couples dance around the deck of “Luxury Liner” (1973), a Noah’s Ark for party animals. The smokestack belches a musical score. “Divers” (1974) hangs from the ceiling so we can see the swimmers from above and below the water line. “Dancers on a Car” (1973 is just that: a couple waltzing across the hood of a 1940’s-style sedan, a Florine-Stettheimer-like fantasia in 3-D.

The post Willard Boepple; Brush, pencil, chisel, knife; Industrial Beauty; Synthesis: Experiments in Collaboration; Joan Brown: Painted Constructions appeared first on artcritical.

“Abstract sculpture has the wonderful potential of catching people coming around a corner and making them say, ‘what the hell is that?'”

So says Willard Boepple (pronounced BUP-lee), whose point is proven at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries where he is staging his first solo New York show since 2000. Enter the marble foyer of this tony, Upper Eastside establishment, and glaring away in the downstairs room is what at first looks like the frame of a prefab garden hut. An impractical array of slats and beams and the dazzling metallic glare of burnished aluminum put paid to that idea, and initial familiarity gives way to deep sense of otherness.

Incongruous as it is, this nine-foot square open cube is not a pop-surreal artefact after all. In fact, the more you engage with it, the more drawn in you are by the intuitive decisions about placement and space. You can walk right through it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook: there is work to do, putting aesthetic flesh on this sculptural skeleton.

Shock may be vital, but for Mr. Boepple it is only a starter. “This thing, this object, this collection of wood or steel, has to justify its existence. This thing- does it make toast? does it hold open the door?- or is it just meant to be looked at? I love that engagement. What a test, to have to justify itself.”

Mr. Boepple is an unabashed modernist: an innovator within a strong, defined sculptural tradition that renews itself through passion and surprise. The artist once spoke of wanting his sculpture to be as naked as music, an ambition that makes sense of the strange mix of complexity and streamlining that characterizes his work. His aesthetic is refined, with enormous emphasis on economy and restraint, but he is no minimalist. He is not interested in reduction per se. In fact, the tighter the work, the more packed it is with formal intrigue.

Willard Boepple was born in Bennington, VT in 1945. For a modernist sculptor who started out in welded metal this is rather like being born in Nasheville, TN for a country and western singer. In his youth, Bennington, with its legendary, progressive arts college, attracted some of the leading figures of the second generation New York School: the British sculptor Anthony Caro, taught there, while Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland lived nearby. The critical guru to this group, Clement Greenberg, gave his famous “Homemade Esthetics” seminars at the college, which was dubbed “Clemsville” by foes of his strict formalism.

“I came from it, like it or not,” says Mr. Boepple about growing up amidst this modernist powerhouse. “It has all got such a bad name in the last twenty years, but what an education, what a group. What a vital, live time it was for art.”

Mr. Boepple, who thought at first he would be a painter, was setting off to New York to find a loft in his nineteenth summer when the sculptor Isaac Witkin detained him with an offer to work as his assistant. “The first day I worked for Isaac I knew sculpture was where I belonged. It was the very physicality, the material, spatial facts of gravity, thickness, it was a bolt from above.” He went on to fabricate many of the tough, spare sculptures Jules Olitski made in the 1960s.

But Tony Caro was “the scuptor to contend with,” says Mr. Boepple in a phrase redolent of the macho, oedipal sense of moving forward through aesthetic struggle. Mr. Boepple’s first series of direct welded steel sculptures were his fireplaces. Like all his work, the commonplace objects they resemble only became clear during the creative process: It wasn’t that he set out to depict fireplaces. Distinguished debut though they were, his fireplaces were very much in harmony with the efforts of Mr. Caro’s countless disciples. “I was looking for a way to get out of the Caro School. Basically, horizontality was his solution to staying abstract. I wanted to go vertical and find a way of standing up that was not figurative. That’s where the stepladder came from.”

The ladder form became the first of three highly distinctive sculptural idioms. Later would come his shelves, and then the rooms. In all these works, there is a striking resemblance to a form utterly familiar in day to day life, and that relate closely to the workings of the body. We climb ladders, put things on shelves, enter and inhabit rooms: all are shaped around ourselves without being bodies themselves.

“If you take a broom and stick it in the ground, you read it as a figure, as you do almost anything vertical, a bottle, whereas a ladder, because of its structural logic, plus its familiarity as something we know and use and feel, escapes that. Maybe it is just having three or four legs which makes them less figuratively read. If you schematize it, ladders probably relate more to architecture than the body.”

It is disconcerting to hear him comment that the ladder is less figural for having three or four legs because Mr. Boepple in fact walks with aid of crutches. This is the legacy of Guillain-Barré Syndrome which struck in 1982 and totally changed his life, and the way he would make art. He was totally paralysed for many months and was left with seriously restricted dexterity.

“When I am asked this question, which I often am, ‘Was there a big break?’ I would almost viscerally answer, No! When I picked up the activity of sculpture again, after that “interlude”, the ladders were where I began. But of course there were changes and differences not simply driven by the medium and the way of working.” He had to give up welding in metal and turn to wood, working through assistants. “As it happens, there is a logic to making ladders in wood, yet I would not have done them in wood were it not for the illness.”

He resumed his work on the ladders, but when a sense of things bursting out of each step took hold, his interest segued into a new form: the shelf. Perhaps his new physical realities conditioned the shift from a form which engages the whole body to one that relates to the hand. “The first of these things started with letter boxes, ‘in-out’ boxes that you have on a desk or shelf, very hand scaled, that you reach into and put things in,” he observes. “Much like the step ladder, it relates to the body with a visual logic that helps build the sculpture.”

The shelves, like the ladders, varied enormously from one piece to the next in terms of complexity or simplicity, movement or stasis. “They come out of the world of mechanical objects, sewing machines, stamping machines, paddles on a steamer, some kind of castanet, who the hell knows?” Often they have a sense of velocity, as if the elements were caught in the act of flapping around or rotating. But he was never tempted to make actual kinetic sculpture. “I want it to be seen the way it is when it is made. I don’t want it controlled by the wind or the viewer. I want the viewer’s participation in it to be driven by the object as it is seen, not by an arbitrary variety.”

Mounted on the wall, often forming a rectangle, the shelves can be read in theatrical terms, with incidents filling the proscenium like action on a stage. And then the rooms can be walked through, or even, in the case of a gazebo he has constructed at his Bennington property, inhabited. What does all this do the viewing experience: are his sculptures objects or environments? “Given the choice, gun to my head, I would say object,” he replies, but then he goes further: “It seems to me that the environment/stage notion is a pictorial way of looking at these objects, and I don’t think they are pictorial.”

They are sculptural in the sense of being involved with three dimensions, and yet there is a striking absence of tactility about the work. Perhaps this reflects the mediated way in which they are made, through assistants. It also goes to the heart of an aesthetic which emphasizes transparency. He was so curious about the inner life of his constructions that he took to casting them in resin, with ethereal, otherworldly and at the same time very empirical results. The rooms also grew out of a desire to make sculpture see-through.

“The rooms came out of a dumb idea. Thinking of the shelves in terms of domestic scale, I wanted to build a structure in which such objects could reside, but the structure itself stopped me and took over. It said, ‘Wait a sec- This is it!’ I did put one shelf in an early one but it looked liked an airconditioner hanging in a window.”

The way he colors or treats his surfaces also makes sculptural experience more visual than tactile. Color is always a late, and secondary decision. It often has to do with “pushing the woodiness of the wood into the distance so that you are aware of the form first and the wood second.” He resents it when people way, “What gorgeous wood, I love wood. And oh! It’s a sculpture.” It should be the other way around. Similarly, the brazen, electric dazzle of the metal surface of “Room” at Salander-O’Reilly dematerializes the aluminum. “You see through it more than you would if the surfaces were dark or solid.”

His career path can look as neat and in its place as his individual sculptures, with ladders evolving through shelves to the open rooms, and finding a synthesis in his calmly enigmatic “temples,” as he has reluctantly named the last group of freestanding wooden constructions. But Mr. Boepple doesn’t see his progress in anything like such placid terms. “Very often, the discoveries come from desperation, from not knowing where to turn or what to do.”

Does he wake up in the morning with a sculptural idea? “Often a sensation: Let’s do this with it.” With “it” implies that the sculpture is already underway. “I say ‘with it’ because a sculpture almost always comes out of the one before, reaction, variation. If the idea is not directly related to the last one then it is the sensation of getting physical–‘get boisterous, come on, these are too placid.’ It’s reacting: Attentuate, pound and pack, or Lift open, slam shut, jam.”

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 8, 2004

The post Willard Boepple appeared first on artcritical.