Beverly Pepper
| Beverly Pepper | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Beverly Stoll December 20, 1922 New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Painter, Sculptor |
Beverly Pepper (born December 20, 1922) is an American sculptor known for her monumental works, site specific and land art. She remains independent from any particular art movement. She was married to the writer Curtis Bill Pepper.
Pepper was born Beverly Stoll on December 20, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York. At sixteen, she entered the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York to study advertising design, photography, and industrial design. She then embarked on a career as a commercial art director. She studied at Art Students' League and attended night classes at Brooklyn College, including art theory with György Kepes, who introduced her to the work of Lasló Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. It was also at this time, in her mid twenties, that she met the environmental artist Frederick Kiesler. Drawn to post-war Europe in 1949, she studied painting in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. There she attended classes with cubist painter André L'Hôte, and with Fernand Léger at his atelier. She also visited the studios of Ossip Zadkine and Brâncuși.
Pepper began her career as a painter, but after a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia in 1960, she was so awed by the temple ruins surviving beneath the jungle growth that she turned to sculpture. She made her debut in 1962 with an exhibit of carved tree trunks at a gallery in Rome.
Pepper introduces her sculptural vocabulary with integrations of wood carvings and metal castings. Art critic, Rosalind Krauss has described the artist's works as violating modernist traditions... "the traditional craft of carving was closed to her … she attacked these logs with electric drills and saws." After several exhibitions in New York and Rome, she was one of ten artists invited by Giovanni Carandente, along with David Smith, Alexander Calder, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Lynn Chadwick, and Pietro Consagra, to fabricate works in Italsider factories in Italy for an outdoor exhibition, "Sculture nella città", held in Spoleto during the summer of 1962. Working directly in the factory, as she would with subsequent major sculptures, Pepper created The Gift of Icarus, Leda, Spring Landscape, two other large works, and seventeen smaller ones.
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