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Beverly Pepper is a world renowned artist whose brilliant and prolific career has spanned over forty years. She has created sculptures in cast iron, bronze, steel, stainless steel, and stone. Pepper is also known for her site-specific projects in which she has incorporated expanses of industrial metals into the landscape, creating large-scale sculptures that were often designed to function as public spaces.
In the late 1970's, Pepper made a series of works referred to as Sentinels in cast iron, a material she pioneered as an artistic medium. Cast ductile iron afforded Pepper the option to work in a greater range of forms and textures than was possible with Cor-ten steel or stainless--the metals she used in earlier sculptures. In general, the power and presence of works from this series are suggestive of monuments, influenced in a physical sense as well as a symbolic one by the architecture and piazzas commonly found in historic towns and cities in Italy, where Pepper has lived.
Pepper continued to explore and expand upon the subtle connotations of power and spiritual presence in other sculptures, such as works from her Marker series. They are tall and totemic, in that sense, akin to obelisks, and identified by their distinctive shapes which the artist describes as "metamorphosed tools." The scale, soaring verticality, and cast iron "weathered" surface of these sculptures transcend literal representations and convey a multitude of archetypical associations along with a pervasive primal bearing. These particular works are similar in form to Split Ritual II, which is on exhibit outdoors at Grounds For Sculpture.
In contrast to these sculptures from the past two decades are stainless steel works with highly reflective surfaces that date from the sixties and are similar to Untitled on view in the Water Garden next to the Domestic Arts Building. Composed of hollow blocks, the exteriors are polished to a mirror-like sheen denying the three-dimensionality of the material, while the open, visible interiors are painted in dark hues to appear solid. This ephemeral tie to the sculpture's surrounding environment--the mirrored image--foretells of Pepper's later earthworks in which the sculpture is physically connected to the site.
Pepper’s most recent works are constructed from large slabs of stone. The lines that skim the surface of her pieces allude to the hand of the artist and are a testament to the physical processes of creation. Paolo e Francesca, displayed in the sculpture park courtesy of the artist, was included in an retrospective of her work held in 1999 at Grounds For Sculpture in the Museum Building and the Domestic Arts Building. Paolo e Francesca was carved from a single block of black African granite. Pepper makes careful cuts to encourage natural breaks in the monolith in the interest of revealing the inherent character of the stone. In this piece in particular, she penetrates the stone to create a triangular “altar” or window of negative space which functions as a major integrating element in the work.
Beverly Pepper was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1924. She has divided her time between homes and studios in New York City and Todi, Italy, since 1951. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions across the United States, including one-person shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY; and the San Francisco Museum of Art, CA and in museums, galleries, and public sites throughout Europe. She is represented in major public and private collections worldwide. In 1981, three works, Symbiotic Marker, Mute Metaphor, and Primary Presence, were installed at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in nearby Trenton, NJ, where they have remained on view.
More information on this artist can be found at: www.beverlypepper.org.
Other works by Beverly Pepper on view in the sculpture park:
Paolo e Francesca, 1999
African black granite
114 1/2" x 80" x 48"
Courtesy of the Artist |
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Split Ritual II, 1992
cast ductile iron
120" x 96" x 96"
Courtesy of The Sculpture Foundation, Inc.
Photo: Ricardo Barros.com
Untitled, c. 1968
stainless steel, enamel paint
17 1/2" x 30 1/2" x 8"
Courtesy of The Sculpture Foundation, Inc.
Photo: Ricardo Barros.com |
