Beverly Pepper | Curvae in Curvae | 2013

Photography: Kevin J. Miyazaki / Sculpture Milwaukee 

Beverly Pepper has had a long and extraordinary career. Like her contemporaries Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson, Pepper forged a unique path as a mid-century feminist artist. She worked against the prevailing attitude towards women making big, physically demanding art that allowed her to mirror the processes of nature itself. Pepper learned to weld by working in actual factories, and there is increasing recognition that she is, indeed, the first American artist to work with Cor-ten steel. Pepper revels in both the built and rural environment, drawing energy and imagery that connects her work to the continuity of human life. 

Pepper started her art training in painting and industrial design in New York before World War II. She moved to Paris after the war, and through her studies and travel, was exposed to the richness of the world’s cultures. She abandoned painting by the 1960s, and was one of the pioneers of large-scale outdoor Earth works, art that escaped the clean spaces of museums, shaping our experience in and of the landscape. Pepper was also a leading artist in creating large-scale, muscular indoor and outdoor sculptures, using the materials of industry to evoke ancient totemic forms from ancient cultures from around the globe.

Pepper moved permanently to Italy in the 1950s, first from her own artistic interests, but stayed because of the work she and her journalist husband embarked upon at a time of great change and promise on the continent. Pepper’s work is infused with the colors and history of her Umbrian home, and while she is not as well-known as her American contemporaries due to her living and working abroad, her self-imposed isolation has allowed her to develop a distinctive vocabulary. 

Pepper’s goal is to dominate the materials of the earth—metal and stone—so that they take on a personality and texture that runs counter to the neutral face of modern architecture. She holds in tension the forms of culture using the materials of nature; she holds in tension the past while suggesting the future. 

Curvae in Curvae uses the Latin feminine word curvae, singular of curvus, or bent, curved. There is something languid about the work, like a tender shoot snaking out of the earth and curling back down into it. Pepper is able to balance the deep earthy tinge of the work’s surface while suggesting the freshness of nature in the spring.