Beverly Pepper was born in New York in 1922, after initial training at the Art Students' League and Brooklyn College in New York, Beverly Pepper moved to Europe when she was still twenty and studied painting in Paris, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she is a student of Andre Lothe and Fernand Léger, before moving to Italy in 1951, where he still lives and works. The great fascination aroused by the ruins of ancient temples, discovered during a trip to Cambodia, led her to devote herself to sculpture, at first engraving wood, then working metal. In 1962 she participates in the exhibition Sculptures in the city, organized in Spoleto by Giovanni Carandente; date back to this time works such as Spring Landscape, The Gift of Icarus, Leda. Pepper starts working on large formats right from the start, assigning his sculptures to outdoor environments and chooses stainless steel as his favorite material: the polished and reflective surfaces of the polished steel reflect the surrounding landscape and include the spectator himself who approaches; the external environment thickens on the sculpture which imposes itself with the same solidity of the landscape. In the seventies Pepper establishes the link with the open space, creating real works of Land Art, mixing industrial materials with nature, and works on Earthbound Sculptures, sculptures that seem to be born and rise directly from the earth. Pepper continues over the years, until today, to experiment with materials, using cor-ten steel and cast iron, intensifying travels between Italy and the United States. Many of her projects have been realized in public parks, which are transformed into places of pause and reflection within the urban fabric, such as the Sol y Ombra in Barcelona in 1986, where she intervened with ceramic tiles, echoing the work of Gaudí, or the recent Calgary Sentinels and Hawk Hill (2008–2010) in Calgary (Alberta, Canada), with cor-ten columns. At the end of November, Pepper will present a project of monumental sculptures in Rome at the Ara Pacis, in which recently created large cor-ten sculptures will be installed on the Lungotevere and on the square in front of the museum. The sculptures by the American artist will remain on display from December 2014 to March 2015
There are numerous awards achieved throughout Pepper's career, among the most recent we mention: Alexander Calder Prize for Sculpture, France, 2003, Alumni Achievement Award, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 2007. National Academican, National Academy Museum and School, New York, 2011, award Lifetime Achievement, International Sculpture Center, New York, 2013.
Beverly Pepper's works have been exhibited in major museums around the world. They are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Center Georges Pompidou and Les Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris, Palazzo degli Uffizi, Florence; National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona; The Contemporary Sculpture Center, Tokyo.
