CAROL BOVE

Hardware Romance presents Bove’s 2021 sculpture of the same title, which she produced as a precursor to her sculptural installation The séances aren’t helping (2021), the second commission to be featured on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Just as the commission was on view twenty-four hours a day, and interacted with its environment accordingly, so is Hardware Romance lit and visible around the clock from the street on Park Avenue for the duration of the exhibition.

Since the early 2000s, 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. She embraces the strategies of modernist formalism as a point of departure, exploring previously overlooked openings in the conventional narratives of art history. “We think stainless steel is hard and strong,” she 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?”

The séances aren’t helping consisted of four large abstract sculptures juxtaposing sandblasted, contorted tubes of stainless steel with reflective aluminum disks, hinting at Art Deco and related historical styles and contrasting with the figurative sculptures that architect Richard Morris Hunt planned for the Met’s now-empty exterior alcoves. Bove based the size of the disks on the diameters of the columns that flank the niches, and of the portraits that adorn the spandrels of their arches. By introducing unexpected elements into a familiar architectural and institutional context, she prompted a subtle reconsideration of the museum’s guiding traditions.

In Hardware Romance, a tube of stainless steel is attached to one edge of a mirror-polished steel disk that is itself supported by an L-shaped piece of the same metal and bolted onto a flat base. The tube’s irregular form and tempered surface contribute to its slightly anthropomorphic quality; it might suggest a figure gazing at its own reflection, or even the erotic union of two parts (hence the sculpture’s title). And while the entire work is made of the same substance, its components’ divergent treatments lend the individual elements very different characters, prompting viewers to question their assumptions about the ‘inherent’ qualities of materials.

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith, an exhibition cocurated and designed by Bove, is on view now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, through January 28, 2024.