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Synopsis
"The places of Beverly Pepper's career range from Brooklyn, to Angkor Wat, Cambodia, to Umbrian Italy. Trained at Pratt Institute, Art Students League, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, and a student of André Lhote and Fernand Léger, she committed herself to a life as a painter. In the course of a worldwide journey in 1960, Pepper came to the medieval temple complex of Angkor Wat. There, amid jungle growth and sacred Khmer statuary, she suffered a conversion - not to Buddhism, but to the art of sculpture. Beverly Pepper: Sculpture in Place surveys the artist's remarkable career, from the time she "walked into Angkor Wat a painter and...left a sculptor" to the present. It si a career of marvelous conversions and stunning changes: from expressive wood carvings, to works that embody carved wood and cast metal elements, to large-scale foundry sculpture. Two years after Angkor Wat, her reputation as a sculptor was already so solid that, in company with such luminaries as Alexander Calder and David Smith, she was commissioned to create monumental works for the Festival dei due mondi in Spoleto, Italy. In the 1960s Pepper worked with Cor-Ten steel, then with stainless, and with stainless variously painted. Into the 1970s she created serene earthbound sculptures and massive cantilevered works. She also began to explore the possibilities of combining tough abstraction with mythically evocative primal forms that have culminated in a series of "totemic" pieces and "urban altars." In addition to her abstract, heroic, and mythic cast and welded sculpture, Pepper has fashioned art of concrete, basalt, the sandscape of a Florida beach, and the earth itself. Protean among contemporary sculptors, Beverly Pepper defies categorization. Nevertheless, the critical challenge of her Oeuvre is brilliantly met here by Rosalind E. Krauss, whose personal and intensely imaginative essay illuminates the historical, aesthetic, and biographical contexts of a quarter-century of exciting art."Book Details
Published
September 1, 1986
Publisher
Abbeville Pr
Pages
179
ISBN
9780896596719