CAROL BOVE

Since the early 2000s, Bove—who was born close to Gstaad, in Geneva—has focused on the interdependence of artworks and their contexts. A poetic use of artefacts and materials ranging from found objects to industrial hardware, along with an acute awareness of architectural sites and modes of display, continues to steer her practice. Embracing the strategies of modernist formalism as a point of departure, Bove’s recent metal sculptures explore previously overlooked openings in the conventional narrative of art history, their appropriated titles adding further layers of reference.

The Machine Age features a group of abstract sculptures that juxtapose contorted tubes of steel with highly reflective, perfectly finished closed cylinders made from the same material. The tubes’ matte urethane paint finish lends their forms a deceptive impression of malleability and lightness, while their punctuation by squat, glossy “polka dot” cylinders hints at disparate styles including Art Deco, Memphis, and Minimalism. The works’ irregular forms and tempered surfaces also contribute to a subtly anthropomorphic quality, suggesting single reclining figures, or perhaps the erotic union of pairs. The exhibition design makes playful use of the gallery’s two different elevations to facilitate a range of possible sight lines.

While revealing the influence of such artists as John Chamberlain, John McCracken, and David Smith, Bove’s new works also resonate with the neglected tradition of ‘plaza art,’ a cheekily named subvariant of mid-century abstract sculpture produced from industrial materials that was rejected by most critics in favour of Minimalism, but which retains an indelible public presence. While each sculpture in The Machine Age is crafted from one type of metal—steel—its components’ divergent surface treatments lend these individual elements distinct characters. This variance prompts viewers to question their assumptions about the ‘inherent’ qualities of familiar substances, and perhaps to rehabilitate the value of plaza art’s bias toward individual subjectivity.

The palettes of Bove’s sculptures are derived in part from existing art. In her essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in 2021–22, curator Catherine Craft points out chromatic resonances between Bove’s works and those of other artists—notably both sculptors and painters—including Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, and Donald Judd. In working on The Machine Age, Bove found herself absorbed in the work of French Symbolist painter Odilon Redon (1840–1916), who employed a combination of acrid hues and faded pastels designed to enhance his compositions’ otherworldly aura. By installing her sculptures on custom-designed white pedestals, Bove allows such connections free play while undergirding their visual relationships with each other and the gallery interior, suggesting a rootedness in both the observable world and the realms of intellect and imagination.