Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I am not here to flatter you nor to offer you yet another pompous lecture on contemporary art. I am now going to talk to you about Carol Bove, this sculptor whose works defy our expectations with disconcerting elegance. Between her twisted steel tubes and her reflective aluminum discs, Bove constructs a world where roughness meets polish, where the industrial embraces the poetic. And all this with a subtle irony that would make even the most austere guardians of the temple of contemporary art smile.
Born in Geneva in 1971 to American parents, raised in Berkeley, California, established in New York since the 1990s, Bove carries within her this triple identity that shines through in her work. Yet don’t see it as easy psychologism. What interests me is how this artist, from a generation that grew up with postmodernism as a backdrop, manages to create sculptures that defy any simplistic categorization.
Bove’s installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021, ironically titled “The séances aren’t helping”, evokes a certain architectural tradition that has been mistreated, twisted, and then reconfigured. These huge steel tubes, bent as if they were rubber, accompanied by reflective discs placed in the niches, create a fascinating visual provocation. Steel, this quintessential industrial material, is treated with an almost paradoxical delicacy.
Bove said about these works: “They are in a way rude, but I think they are also very respectful.” This tension between irreverence and respect characterizes her entire artistic approach. She does not seek to overthrow tradition, but to reconfigure it, to bend it, as she bends her steel tubes, to bring forth new formal possibilities.
The exhibition “Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2021 featured massive sculptures characterized by their presence being both imposing and airy. These works occupy space with authority while maintaining a surprising visual lightness for metal creations. It is precisely this apparent contradiction that gives Bove’s work its emotional power.
If one wants to understand Carol Bove’s work, one must be interested in her complex relationship with architecture. Not architecture as a simple frame or support, but as a privileged interlocutor. Since her residency at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2010, where she studied the architectural history of the campus, Bove has developed a particular sensitivity to the spaces that host her works. In this regard, her self-taught training may have freed her from academic dogmas that imprison so many contemporary artists. She does not bother with traditional disciplinary boundaries and freely draws from the architectural vocabulary to nourish her sculptural language.
Her installation “Vase/Face” at the David Zwirner gallery in Paris in 2022 perfectly illustrates this approach. In this exhibition, Bove plays with the illusion of the Rubin vase, that famous optical illusion where one can see either a vase or two faces looking at each other. She transposes this principle into three-dimensional space, creating sculptures that oscillate between different perceptions depending on the viewer’s position.
The gallery walls had been painted a shade of gray similar to that of the stainless steel used in her sculptures, thus blurring the boundaries between the work and its environment. In doing so, she transforms the architecture into an accomplice of her perceptual game, inviting the viewer to reconsider their relationship to the exhibition space.
Classical architecture, with its principles of order, symmetry, and proportion, is subtly subverted in Bove’s work. Her sculptures sometimes seem to evoke decontextualized architectural fragments, like remnants of an imaginary industrial civilization. This relationship to architecture is reminiscent of Carlo Scarpa’s experiments, with whom she engaged in dialogue during an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2015. Like the Venetian architect, Bove is attentive to joints, connections between elements. Each encounter between two materials is conceived as a moment of fertile tension, an opportunity to create meaning through juxtaposition. “I work improvisationally at full scale,” she explains, emphasizing the importance of physical intuition in her creative process [1].
This architectural approach is also manifested in her way of organizing the exhibition space. Far from conceiving her sculptures as isolated objects, she thinks of them in relation to each other and to the place that hosts them. In this regard, her practice could be described as installation art, but this term does not do justice to the specificity of her approach. Because it is not simply about arranging objects in space, but about creating perceptual situations that invite the viewer to a complex bodily and intellectual experience. Architecture thus becomes not only a subject of reflection but also a methodological model for thinking about sculpture differently.
This architectural dimension is coupled with a keen awareness of art history. Bove’s sculptures often evoke modernist aesthetics, notably Art Deco, Minimalism, or even the Memphis style. However, she does not merely cite these references; she reinvents them, combining them in unexpected ways to create a visual language unique to her. By placing her sculptures in classical niches, such as at the Metropolitan Museum, or arranging them in contemporary spaces, she creates a dialogue between different eras and architectural styles. In doing so, she invites us to reconsider our relationship with architectural heritage and to question the relevance of established historical categories.
If architecture constitutes a key axis for understanding Carol Bove’s work, poetry represents another equally major aspect of her practice. Not poetry as a literary genre, but as a sensitive approach to the material world, as attention to the sensory qualities of objects and materials. In her early works, Bove collected and assembled found objects: books from the 1960s and 1970s, peacock feathers, seashells, driftwood. These materials were arranged with a nearly ritual precision on stands or shelves. There was something deeply poetic in these arrangements, a way of revealing the hidden beauty of ordinary objects through their unexpected juxtaposition.
This poetic sensibility has not disappeared from her recent work, even if the materials have changed. Her steel sculptures, despite their industrial character, possess an almost lyrical quality. The contorted tubes seem frozen in a graceful movement, as if the metal had momentarily escaped the laws of physics to transform into three-dimensional calligraphy.
The poet Wallace Stevens wrote that “[poetry is] an inward violence that protects us from an outward violence.” [2]. This definition could apply to the treatment Bove inflicts on steel. She exerts violence on the material, twisting and bending it, but this violence is transformed into an expressive gesture, a sculptural writing that transcends mere technical manipulation.
The surface of the sculptures also reveals this poetic dimension. Sandblasting the stainless steel gives it a matte texture that contrasts with the reflective polish of the aluminum discs. This attention to the tactile qualities of the materials testifies to a sensibility that goes beyond formal considerations. It is about creating complex sensory experiences that engage the viewer’s entire body.
Color also plays a major role in this poetics of materiality. In her more recent sculptures, Bove uses bright shades, yellows, pinks, oranges, that seem to defy the industrial nature of steel. These colors are not applied uniformly but seem to emanate from the material itself, as if the artist had managed to extract the latent chromatic quality of the material.
This approach recalls that of the Symbolist poets, notably Odilon Redon, whose pictorial work influenced Bove’s chromatic palettes. As Catherine Craft, curator of the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, notes, the chromatic resonances between Bove’s works and those of other artists, notably Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, and Donald Judd, create a visual dialogue that transcends eras and mediums [3].
Bove’s poetry also lies in her way of dealing with scale. Her sculptures constantly play with our perception of dimensions. A small block of stone can evoke a fragment of an Egyptian pyramid, while a massive steel structure seems to defy gravity by its apparent lightness. This play on scale creates a poetic tension between the monumental and the intimate, between actual weight and perceived weight.
As Orit Gat writes about the exhibition “Vase/Face”: “I stood in front of Carol Bove’s new sculptures at David Zwirner and established with them an intuitive and emotional relationship, a way that made me a specific viewer, whose life seeps into the gaze. Although they are made of metal, I saw their softness.” This ability to humanize the industrial material, to infuse it with an almost organic quality, constitutes the very essence of Bove’s poetics.
In a world saturated with digital images and virtual realities, Bove’s insistence on raw materiality, on the physical presence of objects in space, takes on an almost political dimension. She reminds us that our experience of the world passes first through the body, through our ability to perceive the sensitive qualities of the things around us. Perhaps this is where the true subversion of her work lies: not in an explicit critical stance, but in this stubborn affirmation of the value of direct sensory experience, of the physical encounter with the sculptural object. Against the growing abstraction of our lives, she opposes the irreducible concreteness of sculpture.
What strikes in Carol Bove’s journey is her ability to reinvent herself without ever breaking with her fundamental concerns. From her early installations featuring found objects to her recent monumental steel sculptures, one observes not a break but a continuous shift, a methodical exploration of the possibilities of sculptural form. This shift operates first at the level of materials. While Bove’s early works favored objects charged with a specific cultural history, books, magazines, vintage furniture, her recent works turn to more neutral, more abstract materials: steel, aluminum, concrete. This passage from found object to industrial material might seem to mark a radical turn, but it actually fits into a coherent logic.
Because what interests Bove is not so much the material itself as its capacity to convey meaning, to inscribe itself within a network of cultural and historical references. The folded steel of her recent sculptures evokes as much modernist abstraction as industrial aesthetics, furniture design as monumental architecture. It is always about playing with collective memory, but by different means.
This shift is also observed in her relationship to art history. While her early works explicitly engaged with conceptual art and minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s, her recent work broadens this field of references to include more diverse traditions: Art Deco, abstract formalism, but also what she affectionately and ironically calls “plop art,” those abstract sculptures made from industrial materials that were rejected by most critics in favor of minimalism but still retain an indelible public presence.
In an interview granted to Erik Wysocan, Bove explains: “I think of the constructed pieces I make as appropriations, an idea that is difficult to defend. That’s where my interest in vagueness comes in. Vagueness has such a bad reputation, but I like vagueness. It’s not a hesitant or imprecise vagueness; it should simply be difficult to understand exactly why the forms are familiar” [4].
This practice of displacement reaches its peak in her way of treating the exhibition as an artistic medium in its own right. Far from considering the exhibition space as a mere neutral receptacle for her works, Bove conceives it as an active partner in the construction of meaning. She does not hesitate to modify the existing architecture, to play with lighting and wall colors, to create pathways that guide the viewer’s experience.
As she explains: “I think a fundamental entry point for me is the unfixed identity of a sculpture. […] By considering this ‘abduction,’ that is, taking an object out of its ordinary life and bringing it into the gallery, I ask myself, ‘What will the thing add to the exhibition context, and what will the exhibition context add to the thing?’” [4].
This conception of the exhibition as an artistic form in itself aligns with the concerns of certain contemporary curators and theorists who see the act of showing as a fully creative practice. But Bove goes further by integrating this dimension from the process of creating her works. Her sculptures are designed not as autonomous entities but as components of a broader relational system. This constant displacement, this conceptual and formal mobility, may perhaps be what makes Bove’s work so difficult to categorize yet so stimulating. She escapes easy labels, rigid classifications that too often structure our perception of contemporary art. And it is precisely this elusive quality that makes her strength.
In a contemporary art landscape often dominated by explicit critical postures or predictable conceptual strategies, Bove’s subtlety, her way of suggesting rather than asserting, of shifting rather than overturning, constitutes a unique and valuable proposition. She reminds us that art can be both intellectually stimulating and sensorially rich, historically informed and formally innovative. While many of her contemporaries seem to oscillate between disengaged formalism and didactic activism, Bove charts a third path, more nuanced, and also more complex. She invites us to rethink established categories, to question our perceptual habits, to rediscover the pleasure of active contemplation.
It is perhaps this quality of being in-between, this ability to inhabit the interstitial spaces between seemingly contradictory positions, that makes Carol Bove one of the most interesting artists of her generation. Neither entirely within the modernist tradition, nor completely breaking away from it, she occupies this fertile space of the post-postmodern era, where irony does not exclude sincerity, where critique does not prevent wonder.
You see, you bunch of snobs, art can still surprise us. It can still move us without manipulating us, make us think without hammering us with ready-made truths. Carol Bove’s work reminds us of this with rare elegance and an intelligence that does not bother with pedantic demonstrations. She offers us art that breathes, that lives, that dialogues with its time without submitting to it. Art, in short, that deserves our most sustained attention and our keenest sensitivity.
- Nancy Kenney, “They’re kind of impolite’: the artist Carol Bove ruminates on her steel and aluminium sculptures for the Met’s façade”, The Art Newspaper, March 1, 2021.
- Wallace Stevens, “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, 1951, and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”.
- Catherine Craft, “Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures”, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2021.
- Erik Wysocan, “An Interview with Carol Bove”, Metropolis M Magazine, December 2011/January 2012.
