Beverly Pepper

Beverly Pepper was born in Brooklyn in 1922 and died in 2020.

After studying with André Lhote and Fernand Léger at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the late 1940s, Beverly Pepper settled in Rome, where she began focusing on sculpture in 1961. Throughout her career, Pepper created sculptures that appear inseparable from their surroundings, as they belong to the same living landscape.

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Pepper created a group of sculptures in Chauvigny stone that respond to one another while each retaining its own distinct form and surface treatment. The material allowed her to combine geometric forms, particularly the triangle—a recurring element in her work—with more tactile, hand-worked surfaces that softened their otherwise rigorous geometry. Although modest in scale, the sculptures possess a strong monumental presence. Their paired forms evoke cliffs and geological formations, while their textured surfaces suggest the passage of time embedded within the stone. As Pepper observed, “What constitutes my sculptures and what they speak of above all is temporality.”