My work both responds to and tries to reinforce the human capacity for wonder … we can’t rebuild the monuments of the ancient world, but we can aspire to re-evoke, in however modern a world, some of the enduring and perhaps renewable sensations of amazement, even awe. - Beverly Pepper
Born in Brooklyn in 1922, Beverly Pepper knew from childhood that she wanted to be an artist. Her path to sculpture (the specialization for which she is now best remembered), however, was less direct. After completing studies in Industrial and Advertising Design at Pratt Institute and starting a career as a commercial art director, Pepper relocated in the 1940s to Italy, where she devoted herself to painting. In fact, it was not until the early 1950s that Pepper learned to weld, developing a unique formal vocabulary marked by abstract geometric forms on a monumental scale. Such work led to her being linked to early- and mid-twentieth-century art and design movements, such as Russian Constructivism, Minimalism, and the Bauhaus.
Pepper’s sources of inspiration, though, were actually much broader, and included ancient monuments, memorials, and religious sites, whose spirituality, power, and timelessness fascinated her. Those impulses are apparent in Ascension/Descension, each of whose two “legs” rises from a broad, wedge-shaped base to meet at a sharp point at the sculpture’s zenith. Reminiscent of ancient Egypt’s elegant and imposing pyramids and true to the elements of Modern design, the sculpture’s skewed angles, asymmetrical slopes, and gleaming finish attest to Pepper’s ability to craft a seamless dialogue between history and modernity.
