NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announced the global representation of Carol Bove.
“Carol Bove is a leading voice in sculpture today,” said Larry Gagosian. “I’ve been following her work for years and was struck by her installation in the Swiss Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2017. Her intervention into the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 further impressed me, revealing her acute sense of architecture as a framework for sculpture. Carol exhibits a unique capacity for illusion in her use of materials and color. It’s a privilege and honor to partner with her and pursue more ambitious projects together.”
Born in Geneva, and raised in Berkeley, California, Bove relocated to New York in 1993, and is still based there. Since the early 2000s, she has focused on the interdependence of artworks and their contexts. From found objects to industrial construction elements 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 narrative of art history.
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, she incorporates philosophical and cultural allusions into her work. More recently, 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 on the grounds of Kassel’s Orangerie, and 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. In 2021, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas hosted the first major museum exhibition focused solely on Bove’s work in steel, and her installation The séances aren’t helping was the second commission to be featured on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
On October 4, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith, an exhibition cocurated and designed by Bove, will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. This fall, Gagosian will present her work in New York at its Park & 75 location, which is known for its twenty-four-hour visibility from Park Avenue. Further, Bove will present new sculpture during Paris+ par Art Basel, integrating her work within the context of the gallery’s wider historical program.
Carol Bove was born in 1971 in Geneva, and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Austin, TX; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain; and Longlati Foundation, Shanghai. Exhibitions include The Science of Being and the Art of Living, Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2003); Kunsthalle Zürich (2004); Momentum 1: Carol Bove, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2004); “setting” for A. Pomodoro, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin (2006); Tate St Ives, England (2009); Prix Lafayette 2009: Carol Bove, La traversée difficile, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); The Equinox, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Caterpillar, High Line at the Rail Yards, New York (2013); Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria, Contemporary Austin, TX (2017); and Collage Sculptures, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021–22).
