Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present the first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles by pioneering sculptor, Beverly Pepper. Pepper is a world-renowned artist who has been working since the 1950’s in a variety of materials. Although she is known for her monumental public works, site specific and land art installations throughout the world, Pepper has also mastered more intimate forms in cast iron, Cor-ten steel, bronze, stainless steel and stone, treating each material with unique delicacy. In addition, Pepper was among the first artist to use Cor-Ten steel in her sculptures. Originally drawn to the material for its aged look, experiences of time and space motivate her practice. The exhibition will feature iconic works ranging from 1968 to the present day—an original grouping from different series of Pepper’s signature oeuvre.
Notable pieces in the exhibition include Dallas Pyramid, a Cor-ten steel sculpture from 1971 which was originally included in a twenty-year retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and later shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Museum in 1987; a series of unique and rarely exhibited 7-foot hand painted iron spires from the mid-1980’s; and Drusilla Senior, a Cor-ten steel work from 2014 first exhibited in her prominent Ara Pacis museum show in Rome.
Pepper has explained “My work both responds to and tries to reinforce our capacity for wonder, for reorienting ourselves in relation to powers or fields of force (whether internal or external), which are greater than our merely biographical or social selves. Obviously we can’t rebuild the monuments of the ancient world, but we can aspire to re-invoke, in however modern a world, some of the enduring and perhaps renewable sensations of amazement, even awe.” Born in Brooklyn in 1922, Pepper has spent most of her adult life working in central Italy. Her work has been inspired as much by the history of art as by the ruins of antiquity-- amphitheaters, obelisks, caryatids and temple columns.
Her works have been exhibited and collected by major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the White House Sculpture Garden, the Hirschhorn Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Les Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris, the Palazzo degli Uffizi in Florence, and numerous other national museums in Europe and Asia. She is a recipient of The Alexander Calder Prize, the International Sculpture Center’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award and Chevalier de l’Ordre des arts et des lettres in France.
She is currently working on small works in stainless steel, as well as land installations in Italy such as an amphitheater for the city of L’Aquila, a church for the city of Todi and a monumental work for the entry to the port of Venice.
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