Upsilon Gallery is delighted to present Willard Boepple: Paper, wood, and steel, opening November 6th, 2025, and on view through January 3rd, 2026. Celebrated for his abstract sculptures that balance grace, wit, and structure, Boepple’s work captures a profound sense of human experience through form and material. In the new catalog accompanying this exhibition, Karen Wilkin, Contributing Editor at The Hudson Review and regular contributor to The New Criterion and The Wall Street Journal, writes that Boepple’s works, “whether serious and elegant or playful and witty, are completely self-sufficient, idiosyncratic, and resonant with the experience of being human.” This exhibition brings together a dynamic selection of his wood and steel sculptures alongside monoprints and inks on paper, revealing an intimate dialogue between two and three dimensions of his evolving language of form.

For Boepple, the boundary between sculpture and print is porous, an ongoing exchange rather than a division. His practice is founded on the belief that each discipline continually informs the other, generating a fluid interplay of spatial and pictorial ideas. At times, a series of screenprints serves as the conceptual starting point for new sculptural forms; at others, a sculpture provides a fragment or structure that is subsequently reinterpreted in two dimensions. The artist has described these parallel practices as “brothers and sisters, born of the same origin, yet each evolving in its own way.”

In his most recent works, Boepple expands this dialogue further through the act of painting directly onto paper. Translating sculptural motifs into two-dimensional compositions, he allows shape and color to assume architectural weight. A ladder-like form from one sculpture, for instance, becomes a structural armature within a painted work, while layered transparencies on a lightbox serve as studies in spatial rhythm and chromatic tension. This recursive process underscores Boepple’s ability to reinvent form across mediums, maintaining a disciplined clarity while embracing improvisation and discovery.