Beverly Pepper

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by the esteemed American sculptor, Beverly Pepper. The exhibition showcases ten sculptures of steel and stainless steel, adding to a prodigious career that has spanned over seven decades.

This new series of small sculptures continues Pepper’s contemplation of time, materiality and place, and is part of Pepper’s wider series of curved forms, or Curvae. Revisiting previous explorations of steel forms presented throughout her vast oeuvre, the changes in materiality, marked by the oxidization that occurs over time in the steel works, thoughtfully reflect the passing of time as a visually rich continuum.

Pepper’s masterful manipulation of steel demonstrates the same physical strength and elegant geometry that can be found in her large-scale sculptures. Like many of her monumental works, the small steel sculptures in this exhibition engage with opposing forces – vertical and horizontal, interior and exterior, past and present. The artist explains, “Opposing forces are integral to any serious work of art, especially in using organic forms within geometric ones or vice-versa. These opposing forces give a dynamic to the work, with an internal dialogue.” Rosalind Krauss, the venerable art historian and critic, notes the recurrence of the curved form in Pepper’s monumental works as “marrying the vertical with the horizontal.” The same dynamic relationships can be applied to Pepper’s small sculptures, in the interplay of convex and concave forms which creates a meditation of space that is at once interior and exterior, as well as dominant and intimate. Pepper describes the effect of the upward curve as “arched over the viewer creating an inside-outside space... a space that seemed to embed the viewer within the sculpture.” Although the sculptures are physically small, they are monumental in feeling and impression.

Born in 1922 in Brooklyn, Beverly Pepper trained to be a painter. After studying under Fernand Léger and André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Pepper moved to Italy in the 1950s. Later in 1960, a trip to Angkor Wat inspired her to turn to sculpture. Pepper’s first exhibition of wooden sculptures was held at the Pogliani Gallery in Rome in 1961. In 1962, she participated in the landmark exhibition, Sculpture Nella Citta, along with David Smith and Alexander Calder in Spoleto, Italy. In addition to a lifetime of gallery exhibitions, she has had numerous solo museum shows, among them those at the Albright-Knox Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Art, California, and most recently, Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome.

In 2013, Pepper was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award as an acknowledgement of her significant and continuing contribution to sculpture. Previous recipients include Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella and Anthony Caro.

Throughout her career she has realized numerous public commissions around the world and is represented in the permanent collections of leading institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome. Solo museum shows include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York and The Contemporary Sculpture Center, Tokyo.

An illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition.