Since the early 2000s, Carol Bove has focused on the interdependence of artworks and their contexts. From found objects to industrial construction hardware and architectural sites, her poetic use of materials is amplified by her current work in large-scale metal sculpture. Bove embraces the strategies of modernist formalism as a point of departure, exploring previously overlooked openings in the conventional narratives of art history.
Read MoreBove was born in 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland, and raised in Berkeley, California. She relocated to New York in 1993 and earned a BS from New York University in 2000. Her first major museum exhibition was held at Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany, in 2003. Between 2009 and 2013, Bove taught at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Bove's early assemblages often feature publications related to the intellectual fashions of the 1960s and '70s, juxtaposed with objects such as stones and feathers to trace links between periods, places, and ideas. Thus, even while drawing on conventions of display and exercising formal restraint, Bove integrates philosophical and cultural allusions into her work. When Attitudes Become Form (2002) features wooden shelves stocked with books, including the catalogue for the eponymous 1969 exhibition and volumes on psychedelic drugs. Other projects incorporate the work of other artists; in Shrine to Eris (2010), Bove adds reproductions of paintings by Hans Hofmann to an arrangement of peacock feathers and other items, while in "setting" for A. Pomodoro (2014), she includes a sculpture by Italian modernist Arnaldo Pomodoro.
In more recent work, Bove has continued to investigate these ideas at monumental scale. At Documenta 13 (2012), she exhibited four outdoor sculptures inspired by eighteenth-century statues of mythological gods in the grounds of Kassel's Orangerie, following the gardens' design to emphasize the spatial relationship between the figures of Flora and Apollo. In 2013, she installed Caterpillar, a set of seven abstract sculptures that made use of a wild stretch of the High Line at the Rail Yards, New York. And in works like Aphorism (2018) and Bather (2019), she employs crumpled stainless-steel tubing with a matte-finish coating of urethane paint that lends their forms a deceptive impression of malleability and lightness. "We think stainless steel is hard and strong," Bove has reflected, "and I'm wondering if this is really the case. Is there a gentle and persistent way to act on it so that it will behave differently?"
In 2017, Bove was invited to respond to the legacy of Alberto Giacometti in Women of Venice at the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia, and she acknowledges the influence of twentieth-century sculptors such as Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain, and Tony Smith on this strand of her practice (in 2019 she exhibited alongside Chamberlain at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In 2021–22, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first major museum exhibition focused solely on her steel sculptures, and her installation The séances aren't helping (2021) was the second commission to be featured on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 2023, Bove cocurated and designed Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Bove is board chair at SculptureCenter, New York.
Text courtesy Gagosian.