Institutions, Venice
Beverly Pepper
Art in the Open
Spazio ThetisFondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper with the support of the Municipality of Todi and Umbria Region is participating in the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with the exhibition Beverly Pepper - Art in the Open, curated by journalist and art critic Massimo Mattioli in collaboration with Joseph Antenucci Becherer Director of Snite Museum of Art of the University of Notre Dame. The exhibition, is part of the wider project, Beverly Pepper Between Todi and the World, with which the city of Todi celebrates this year the tireless activity of the great American sculptor with exhibitions, events and a park of her sculptures. The exhibition project spotlights the important American sculptor Beverly Pepper, for nearly 50 years Italian by adoption. An exhibition that is proposed as an important piece of a wide tribute to the great artist, started in 2018 and programmed in different events throughout the year 2019 and which includes the inauguration of a sculpture park dedicated to her, the Park of Beverly Pepper, which will present to the public 20 great works donated by her to the city of Todi. This is the context where the idea of an exhibition that completes the tribute has born, enhancing it thanks to the prestige of La biennale di Venezia at an international level, which already in the XXXVI 1972 edition saw Beverly Pepper among the invited artists. The exhibition will be hosted in Spazio Thetis halls, which already exhibits four important columns of the artist permanently displayed in the courtyard of the space, the original "Todi Columns" that Pepper donated to the Musei Civici in Venice in the 1990s. Introduced by this important scenography, the exhibition will also exhibit some large Beverly Pepper sculptures in Cor-Ten steel. The exhibition itinerary will be enriched by a series of unpublished photographs shot by the great artist Gianfranco Gorgoni - also present at the Venice Biennale, in the 1979 and 1993 editions, that has documented Beverly's career since the 1970s and by the screening of the documentary "Beverly Pepper's Umbria" produced in collaboration with Umbria Region, curated by Luca Cococcetta and Marco Zaccarelli. Beverly Pepper was born in Brooklyn in 1922, lives and works in Todi, Italy and New York. Pepper trained to as a painter with Fernand Leger and André Lhote in Paris. She studied advertising design, photography and industrial design at the Art Students League in Brooklyn and, in 1940, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. During his European stay she visits Italy and Rome, where she meets the journalist and writer Curtis Bill Pepper, who will become her husband. Her first solo show in 1952, at the Galleria dello Zodiaco in Rome, was presented by Carlo Levi. During these years she attended the artists Achille Perilli, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Giulio Turcato of the Forma1 Group and weaved numerous relationships with the Roman cultural environment. In 1960, after a trip to Cambodia at Angkor Wat, she radically changed her artistic language, approaching sculpture and creating small shapes in wood and clay. She exhibited for the first time as a sculptor in 1961 in New York and in Rome at the Galleria Pogliani, with a critical presentation by Giulio Carlo Argan. In 1962 she participated in the landmark exhibition Sculture nella Cittá, at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. The artist creates various medium and large-sized works within the Italsider workshops in Piombino, an experience that confirms her definitive transition to the art of forging and shaping metal. Between 1967 and 1969 she experimented the connective-art and environmental projects using grass, sand and hay. Between 1971 and 1975 she made her first environmental project in Dallas, Dallas Land Canal and Hillside. In 1971 Pepper was hosted by the city of Rome to exhibit a dozen stainless steel sculptures in Piazza Margana. In 1972 she attended the 34th Venice Biennale and moved to Todi, where she built her atelier-factory in her residence. Between 1974 and 1976 she made one of her first works of Land Art, Amphisculpture, in New Jersey and in 1977 she exhibited at the Documenta 6 of Kassel. In 1998 she realizes the installation at Forte Belvedere. Among the environmental works: Todi Columns installed in Piazza del Popolo in Todi, Spazio Teatro Celle in Pistoia, Narni Columns in Narni, Palingenesis in Zurich, Sol y Ombra Park in Barcelona, Manhattan Sentinels in New York, Departure for My Grandmother in Vilnius, Lithuania and Broken Circle at the Brufa Sculpture Park in Umbria. In 2014 Beverly Pepper exhibited her “Curvae” series at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, managing to combine the past with the present. Among the latest works by Land Art we find Amphisculpture, a 3000 square meter open-air theater, the largest in central-southern Italy, created and donated by Beverly Pepper to the city of L'Aquila. Throughout the years, she has received several awards, among those: Doctor of Fine Arts Pratt Institute; Accademico di Merito, Universtiy of Perugia; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France; The Alexander Calder Prize, 2000; Pratt Institute, Legends Award, 2003; the International Sculpture Center Life Achievement Award, 2013 and Commendatore all’Ordine del Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2015.