Carol Bove

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.

Bove 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.