Beverly Pepper (1922–2020) was one of the leading figures of contemporary sculpture. Her artistic research spanned more than half a century, evolving from the still modernist, modular and reflective works of the 1960s to monumental, site-specific interventions. Through her work, she redefined the relationship between art, landscape, and community, and renewed the very concept of the monument. Born in Brooklyn and trained in painting and design, she chose Italy as her second homeland, weaving together an American sensibility with Europe's classical roots.
The exhibition that CUBO dedicates to the artist across its two venues in Bologna, curated by Ilaria Bignotti e Marco Tonelli and in collaboration with The Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation, offers a journey into Pepper's iconic and linguistic universe through sculptures, drawings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and archival materials. It retraces the genesis of an artistic vision in which every form is conceived as a meeting point between body and landscape, matter and light, past and present: places where each person can rediscover a sense of belonging and participation.
At the center of the exhibition, two works from the Unipol Group's Artistic Heritage — Virgo Rectangle Twist (1967) and Prisms I (1967–1968) — mark a decisive moment in the artist's research, when sculpture ceased to be a mere object of contemplation. Their mirrored surfaces reflect and incorporate both the landscape and the viewer, anticipating the notion of Connective Art: art as a field of connection, imbued with a subtle energy that envelops and unites the viewer, the work, and the world around them.
In her sculptural practice, Beverly Pepper reconciled opposites and dissolved boundaries between disciplines and perceptions: sculpture became architecture, the artwork included the public, monumentality coexisted with intimacy, stability with movement. Rootedness and openness, transcendent verticality and connective horizontality, industrial materials and archetypal forms intertwined in a language able to embrace and unify seemingly distant dimensions.
Pepper also developed the concept of amphisculpture: a contemporary amphitheater that unites sculpture, architecture, and nature in a single collective experience. At the same time, she reimagined the monument as a secular, collective place — accessible to all, custodian of memory, and a stimulus for reflection on the future and on our shared responsibility.
In her later works, this vision finds poetic synthesis in the concept of querencia, a Spanish word that denotes the spot in the arena where the bull feels safe. Her sculptures thus become emotional and spiritual refuges, welcoming us and reminding us that there is always a place where we can rediscover a sense of belonging to something greater.
In Porta Europa, the watercolors for Spazio Teatro Celle and Cromlech Glen testify to the artist's drive toward an environmental sculpture in dialogue with nature. Diagonal Kappa and photographs of Beverly Pepper at work and beside Sulla Senior recount the evolution of her sculpture, from geometric rigor to organic fluidity.
In Torre Unipol, the drawings of the celebrated Columns show the encounter between archaic verticality and the modernity of iron. The watercolors for Spazio Teatro Celle and the model for Amphisculpture for L'Aquila highlight the fusion of landscape, sculpture, and architecture: not only monumental works, but places of sociality — safe spaces in which to rediscover oneself, others, and a shared collective identity.
In this context, the notion of Space Outside embraces both a physical and immaterial dimension, where art, nature, and community merge, and the artwork opens itself to the world, generating shared experiences that leave a lasting mark on collective memory.
