Beverly Pepper

(USA) *1922 in New York City; †2020 in Todi, Italy

Beverly Pepper has lived in New York and Italy since 1951. Since the early 1960’s she has created an extensive and varied body of sculptural works and open space projects. Her early work is marked by its purely abstract, geometrical quality. Later Pepper concerned herself with architectonic and organic forms, or designed landscape projects. Her open-air sculptures always create a space in which Man and Nature are enveloped. More than four metres high, Beverly Pepper’s steel work on display in the Kurpark, ”Longo Monolith”, seems to turn in space and despite its monumental size defy gravity. A subtly positioned vertical rut runs up the middle of the curved inner surface, emphasizing its incline. At the same time, on the other side a vertical split, narrower as it gets higher, suggests a breaking open of the material as if through the degree of torsion. The play of light and shade on the different parts of the oxidized, red-brown mottled surface gives the work an impression of lightness and dynamic movement. Only by circling round the work can the observer appreciate the multiple impressions it conveys.