Beschreibung:

44Beverly PepperUnique tablecirca 1973 Polished and brushed stainless steel. 70.8 x 428.8 x 169.9 cm (27 7/8 x 168 7/8 x 66 7/8 in.) Estimate £25,000 - 35,000 Place Advance BidContact Specialist Madalena Horta E Costa Head of Sale, Associate Specialist +44 20 7318 4019 MHortaECosta@phillips.com
Condition ReportSign UporLog InDescriptionOur Buyer's Premium has been updated. View our Conditions of Sale.ProvenanceCount Urbano Rattazzi, Italy Private collection, Milan, acquired directly from the above, 1980s Thence by descent to the present ownerCatalogue EssayConnective Art: Beverley Pepper's Utopic Vision for Design By Dr. Margaret J. Schmitz Beverly Pepper shattered glass ceilings by becoming a world-renowned, female artist of monumental, site-specific steel sculpture during the 1960s and 70s. This time period, and the medium with which she worked, is most commonly associated with her contemporary male peers. However, Pepper’s angled and curvilinear forms comprised of Cor-Ten steel predate even Richard Serra and Donald Judd’s use of the material. Her work appears to derive much theoretical and aesthetic inspiration from mid-century movements such as Land Art and Minimalism, but it would be wrong to define Pepper with these labels in any conclusive way. To do so would fail to acknowledge the profound impact that Pepper’s work had on formulating these movements in the first place. Additionally, such an assertion would minimise Pepper’s utopian agenda, unique amongst her contemporaries, which sought to foster connection between viewers and their fellow human beings, nature, and themselves. In Pepper’s own words: ‘The work should be in dialogue with the people around it. I believe this is a prime function of art in a world increasingly hostile to human life. With the pollution of the environment, the atomising of the human spirit, it is increasingly necessary that modern art, especially public art, have some relationship with people–that is, with the world of common experience…Art must speak to the troubled, alienated human being for this reason I conceive of a return to a relationship between art and the living world which can be called Connective Art…’ [1] Connective Art’s potential social impact was the theoretical catalyst for Pepper’s experiments with site and space. The present table offers an intimate example of Pepper’s motivations in this regard. Simultaneously, the work is unusual for the artist’s oeuvre in that it is equally a sculpture and a utilitarian object. The fact that it is both is perhaps the perfect culmination of Connective Art’s goals: the table invites its users and spectators into a shared, abstract fantasy. Pepper’s conceptual framework required that her art provide people with a safe space that was removed from the chaos inundating contemporary life. What better way for Pepper to reify Connective Art than by turning her sculpture into furniture, particularly a table – an object whose spirit and function is to serve as a human meeting place? What is more, Pepper has stipulated that if a single person came upon her work, they would never feel alone with it. The table’s intense angularity and shimmering surface brazenly announces the object’s presence and, consequently, a sense of communion is created between the object and its spectator. Pepper has explained the aesthetic experience she wished people to inhabit when approaching her work: ‘seeing, touching, and the physical sensory engagement is the way into my sculpture; my intention is that the meaning of my work rests in experiencing it.’ [2] The present lot is, likewise, emphatically multi-sensory. The table is comprised of smooth, polished stainless steel that mirrors a rippled abstraction of the room surrounding it. Its top is met by three additional triangular slabs of steel serving as the table’s base, which recede downward to a support made of steel-reinforced concrete. The support element is meant to hide underneath the floor, ensuring that the object appear weightless, with its impressive form seemingly balanced on a mere few centimetres. As a spectator approaches the work and walks around it, the planes and linear elements supporting the table top’s reflective surface suddenly appear then dissipate into voids. Characteristic of Pepper,