From Oct. 16, 2025, to Jan. 24, 2026, CUBO, the Unipol Group’s business museum, will host the exhibition Beverly Pepper. Space Outside, curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Marco Tonelli and produced in collaboration with the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation in Todi. The exhibition is intended to be a broad survey of the work of one of the protagonists of contemporary sculpture. Thirty-six works including sculptures, models, drawings, watercolors and sketchbooks will be on display for the occasion, enriched by a rich iconographic material consisting of photographs and videos.
The exhibition brings together works made between 1965 and 2018 with the intention of emphasizing topical issues such as the link between art, the environment, collective memory and community participation, elements central to Pepper’s artistic research.
A central element of the exhibition itinerary are two monumental sculptures belonging to the Unipol Group art collection: Prisms (1967-1968) and Virgo Rectangle Twist (1967), placed at Porta Europa and Torre Unipol, respectively. These works represent a crucial moment in the sculptor’s stylistic evolution as she begins to conceive of the public work as a tool for inclusion and participation, a place for sharing and experience. In the exhibition, each of the two works is juxtaposed with design drawings of the sculptures themselves and with drawings of environmental projects, which, as Ilaria Bignotti writes in the catalog, testify to “that continuous flow of scale and thought that the sculptress knew how to translate into plastic works and great interventions.”
It was precisely in the years of the making of Prisms and Virgo that the artist elaborated a vision of land art as an “anti-monument”: no longer a rhetorical celebration of a hero, but a secular space of collective memory. This path will give rise to his idea of Connective Art, an art that becomes “environment” and “experience,” capable of protecting, welcoming and reestablishing a deep connection between man, shared time and space.
In an age marked by disorientation and detachment, Pepper’s works retain a surprising strength: they demonstrate that art, when truly public, is much more than an object: it is an experience with which to identify, in which to recognize and find oneself. This is also demonstrated byAmphisculpture, an outdoor theater donated to L’Aquila in 2018 after the 2009 earthquake, the maquette of which can be seen in the exhibition.
The exhibition is enriched by a wide selection of images that constitute a work in themselves, offering a visual mosaic of the sculptor at work, now portrayed with short hair in the foundry, where she called herself George to learn the secrets of casting, now the protagonist and muse of her own creations.
The Bologna exhibition reconstructs the key stages in which the sculpture of the artist - American by birth but deeply tied to Italy, particularly Todi where she lived from 1972 until her death - became landscape, architecture and collective feeling. A journey through materials, forms and ideas, still in dialogue with the challenges of the present, that invites us to rediscover the sense of belonging and the connection between people, environment and urban space.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog with texts by the curators and Arianna Bettarelli, head of the Beverly Pepper Projects Foundation archive.
To further explore the artist’s poetics, CUBO is also organizing a study day on Nov. 27, 2025, with talks by Andrea Pinotti, Loris Cecchini, Marco Tonelli and Arianna Bettarelli, moderated by Ilaria Bignotti.
For info: www.cubounipol.it
Hours: Monday 2 to 7 p.m.; Tuesday through Friday 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed Sundays.
Free admission.
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| In Bologna, CUBO Unipol presents an extensive survey of Beverly Pepper |
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