Beverly Pepper’s ambition to use nature as her canvas and the earth itself as sculptural material had been gradually gathering momentum. In 1984, she began the syntheses of these impulses when the city of Barcelona selected her as one of several internationally known sculptors to create a contemporary monument as part of an urban renewal program in the Catalan capital. She used the opportunity of designing a public park in a rundown industrial area near the Estacio del Nord railroad station to synthesize many threads of her thinking regarding landscape architecture’s potential for urban enhancement.

The ambitious renovation program for Barcelona was central to the revival of the Catalan language and culture after the rebirth of democracy following Franco’s death. One of the great cosmopolitan capitals of Europe early in this century and the cradle of Spanish Modernismo, the ancient capital of Catalonia suffered what Time magazine described as “malign neglect” after Catalan independence was crushed during the Spanish Civil War.

Barcelona was the artist’s dream project. Oriol Bohigas, the city’s progressive urban planner and architect, selected a group of world-famous artists who included great Spanish sculptors such as Eduardo Chillida and Joan Miró, as well as Americans like Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, and Roy Lichtenstein. Bohigas and Josep Acebillo, the program’s planning coordinator, gave the artists an unprecedented degree of freedom and control as well as all the technical aid they required to realize their projects.

Ultimately, seventy-two large-scale public sculptures were placed all over the city. According to Mayor Pascual Maragall, the result was “a museum in the street.” Pepper, however, did not want to simply place a sculpture outdoors; she wanted to create a total environment, which would have a practical public use. She considered her park commission a great challenge that would permit her to integrate many of the elements she had studied and worked on separately.  She knew it would be difficult, time-consuming, and elaborately complex. In the end, she invested five years, from 1987 to 1992, in collaborating with Catalan landscape architects,  Andreu Arriola and Carmine Fiol, and artisans to create the huge, 325,000 square-meter park near the abandoned railroad station.

In the 1960’s, she had made a very successful series of elegant, polished stainless works that seemed to tumble or imply movement or gesture. Inside, the cubes were frames so one could see through them in the sense of the “all-at-once” gestalt of Minimal art. The reflective, polished stainless steel exterior was as pristine and elegant as any Donald Judd “specific object” – yet it included the sky, the grass, and even the viewer in the piece. Inside, they were painted an intense sky-blue enamel that gave them an incredible allure and once more suggested the sky, a motif picked up again in Cel Caigut, the sculptural element in the Barcelona park.
           
Pepper christened her Barcelona park Sol i Ombra (Sun and Shade), not as an allusion to the bullring, but to the passage of the seasons, making it possible to enjoy and to be conscious of seasonal change. It was the culmination of two decades of research into inserting art into nature in an intimate relationship that compromised neither.  Sol i Ombra constitutes two opposing elements: the solid, ceramic-covered volumetric earth mound Cel Caigut (Catalan for “fallen sky”), and the open, transparent Spiral of Trees, a descending spiral of plane trees more than 55 meters in diameter that provides a shady contrast to the exposed portions of the park. The graduated sloping rings of the Spiral of Trees provide seating for the public in search of sun and fresh air.

In Barcelona, the flat seating areas are made of lavender and blue tile that recall traditional azulejos. Garry Apgar described it in the February 1991 issue of Art in America as a “continuous curving multishaded blue ceramic bench, burrowed, like a shallow corkscrew, into the earth.”

Cel Caigut is content-specific as well as site-specific. In an homage to Gaudi, the great turn-of-the-century Catalan architect, Pepper covered the earth mound with shimmering ceramic tile, the material Gaudi used in his famous Park Guëll, where the mountain of Tibidabo rises above the city of Barcelona. Clearly, she was also impressed by the elaborate hand-worked surfaces and the fusion of sculpture and architecture of Gaudi’s cathedral of La Sagrada Familia, which was finally being completed almost 100 years after it had been begun. Living in Italy had made her especially sensitive to the quality of artisanship; even her earliest carved wood sculptures are irregular, revealing a human touch. In Barcelona, she was able to develop this concern for the uniquely handmade to an extraordinary degree.  She consciously wanted to introduce the uneven trace of the human hand and the linearity of drawing into a huge environmental project.

Working with, Catalan ceramicist Joan Ravantos, Pepper experimented to make her colors light and transparent, like watercolor tints – a departure from Gaudi. Ultimately, she decided on variegated shades of blue suggesting sky and sea, since Barcelona is a seaport. Each tile is different, and the variation of color adds to the rolling, rippling effect. The transparent glaze she chose, which had to be brushed on by hand like watercolors, actually reflects the sky, which seems to have “fallen” into the piece.

Pepper designed the seating, lights and gates needed for a park. Pepper found precedent for the thirty-three 13 1/2 foot tall cast-iron lighting columns, with light coming from the interior shaft of illumination, in the 60-foot-high cast-iron sculpture she did for architect Cesar Pelli for a Houston complex in 1981. Once again, an obsession with the continuity of memory caused her to incorporate and build on the past rather than to throw it away in ephemeral works that were the fashion of the moment.

Beverly Pepper: Three Site-Specific Sculptures, by Barbara Rose, 1998.