RETRO’ 10 Years by Richard Pepitone
Opening Reception Thursday, October 21st @ 6:30pm
RICHARD PEPITONE
Born in Brooklyn in 1936, Pepitone became an apprentice to sculptor Alfred Van Loen in Greenwich Village at age 20, opened his first studio in the East village, studied in Florence, Italy and has been working in Provincetown for over 30 years. Through these years, he has sought variety in creating sculptural forms, working in polyester resin, bronze, raku and copper from recycled pipes.
During the 70s and early 80s, Pepitone created female figures of life size dimension and form in polyester resin in his “Negative Dimensional Form” series, sanding and polishing them to perfection. He moved to bronze in the mid-80s, discovering classical bronze fragments of the female figure more lovely to his eye.
In the late 80s, Pepitone began to think about the pollution generated from his work. Wanting to make his process more sensitive to the environment, he began creating abstractions of the human figure assembled out of found objects.
Finding three weathered oars at the Provincetown Harbor, Pepitone leaned them against the wall and one day they spoke to him. He was led to contemplate abstract figures and images akin to Native American iconography, shields and totems. His highly praised, Homage to the Fishermen, now stands in the park at the foot of MacMillan Wharf in Provincetown.