"My work both responds to and tries to reinforce our capacity for wonder, for reorienting ourselves in relation to powers or fields of force (whether internal or external), which are greater than our merely biographical or social selves. ... We can’t rebuild the monuments of the ancient world, but we can aspire to re-invoke, in however modern a world, some of the enduring and perhaps renewable sensations of amazement, even awe.”
Beverly Pepper
(b. Brooklyn, NY, 1922, d. Todi, Italy, 2020)
Beverly Pepper was a world-renowned sculptor, spending most of her six-decade career working in central Italy. Known for her monumental public works, site-specific land art installations throughout the world, Pepper also mastered more intimate forms in cast iron, Cor-Ten steel, bronze, stainless steel, and stone.
In 1962, as one of three Americans to be included in the exhibition of outdoor sculpture Sculture nella città (Sculptures in the City) in Spoleto, Italy, Pepper learned how to weld in a steel factory, producing nearly two dozen metal works. In 1967, two years before Robert Smithson began using similar materials, Pepper began creating outdoor works with mirrored surfaces that reflected their surroundings. Zig-Zag, 1967, can be found in the collection of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York—the first institution to hold a major traveling retrospective of Pepper’s work in 1986.
In the early 1970s, Pepper was among the first to use Cor-Ten steel in her sculptures. This marked the beginning of her land art installations, including earthbound sculptures comprised of triangular steel ridges embedded into landscape. She went on to combine abstraction and primitive forms to create what she called “totemic” pieces and “urban altars.”
Pepper’s work has been exhibited and collected by major museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The White House Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Beverly Pepper passed away on February 5, 2020, in Todi, Italy.
