Beverly Pepper
American, 1924 - 2020Plus Cathedra, 1968
On view
Stainless steel (baked enamel)
Dimensions20 × 27 × 18 in. (50.8 × 68.6 × 45.7 cm)
Gift of friends in memory of Joel Hodge, 1969.8
Plus Cathedra is from a series of sculptures created by Pepper between 1967 and 1969. These pieces are essentially open-ended cubes, almost entirely sliced through. The resulting frame-like shapes, fanned and opened out, appear delicately balanced. Pepper coats the interiors of the boxes with baked enamel (white, in the case of Plus Cathedra) while the exteriors of the boxes are of highly polished, reflective stainless steel. The steel surfaces mirror the environment in which the sculpture is placed. As a result, when the viewer moves around the box sculptures, the exterior of the work becomes almost invisible from certain angles. These pieces create two related illusions: they both reflect their surroundings and become invisible in them.
