From April 6 to May 12, 2019, Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper, in collaboration with the Municipality of Todi, presents, in Piazza del Popolo, one of the most beautiful in Italy, the re-installation of the’ Todi Columns‘, four monumental sculptures about 10 meters.
A unique opportunity to appreciate these monumental works in the historic meeting place of the local citizens, an impressive square whose ancient architecture naturally accepts these ingenious intrusions.
The event has a clear reference to the historic 1979 exhibition titled ‘Sculptures in the Piazza’, and, after forty years, brings back the four iron giants to soar in the heart of the medieval city.
The American artist commented: “The Todi Columns constituted a unique event at the time and remained in the memory of the citizens who still, when they meet me on the street, ask me questions about that moment, about the sculptures, they tell me ‘we were not ready’, ‘we didn’t understand’… I would like to give the city of Todi a memory of its experiences, a continuity. For this reason, the columns will be remanufactured and installed again in the square after forty years.”
The history of the ‘Todi Columns’ begun in Todi in 1979, but after the successful installation in Piazza del Popolo, the sculptures were exhibited in the United States: in Washington, in 1980, during the International Sculpture Conference, and in the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, in 1987. In the 1990s the works returned to Italy for an exhibition in Venice on the occasion of the 1996 Biennale, to then be exhibited in Florence, in 1999, as the undisputed protagonists of a Pepper’s solo exhibition. The artist subsequently donated them to the Civic Museums of Venice, which installed them in the courtyard of Spazio Thetis of the Arsenale di Venezia.