LONDON.- Marlborough Fine Art London announces an exhibition of new works by American sculptor Beverly Pepper (b. 1922), opened on 1 July 2014. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK and an important moment for the artist who at 92 years old, is frequently compared to contemporaries such as Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson.

The exhibition celebrates a prodigious career that has spanned seven decades, containing new sculptures and works on paper. The series of work continues to explore the artist’s ongoing fascination with time, materiality and place, and is part of Pepper’s wider series of curved forms, or Curvae.

Having studied in Paris, attending classes by Fernand Léger and André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Pepper moved to Italy in the 1950s, where she began creating the large-scale monumental sculptures for which she is known. The sculptures are often site-specific, relating directly to their environment and incorporating the viewer as an element of the work. Pepper has worked across a variety of mediums, including cast iron, stone and ceramic, and was one of the first artists to use Cor-Ten, a naturally weathering steel that acquires a rust-like appearance over time. Throughout her career, Pepper has always been at the centre of the fabrication process, and has worked predominantly in Umbrian metalwork factories near her studio in Todi, a fact that distinguishes Pepper from most of her female contemporaries.

In 2013 Pepper was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award as an acknowledgement of her significant and continuing contribution to sculpture. Previous recipients include Louise Bourgeois, Frank Stella and Anthony Caro. Pepper rose to the top of the international art scene at 40, as the only female artist represented by a major gallery (Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Rome), but until now has not been shown in the UK.

Throughout her career she has realised numerous public commissions around the world and is represented in the permanent collections of leading institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome. Solo museum shows include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York and The Contemporary Sculpture Center, Tokyo.