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David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new steel sculptures by Carol Bove at the gallery’s Paris location. Featuring sandblasted stainless steel sculptures and wall-mounted works in painted color, the presentation follows the artist’s acclaimed 2021 exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and will be Bove’s first solo show in Paris since her Prix Lafayette presentation at Palais de Tokyo in 2010.
On view in the main gallery space will be large-scale sculptures made of crumpled stainless steel tubing, each combined with a large, circular glass disk. Presented in a monochrome environment, the installation considers the phenomenological experience of form and the surrounding spatial context. Installed at different elevations and surrounded by gray flooring and walls, the sculptures feature unpainted, contorted and folded steel tubing that has been sandblasted to create a uniformly smooth, almost claylike finish. This matte surface attests to the works’ physical presence as unadorned steel, while also producing an illusionistic effect, as if painted. Combined with large reflective disks–made with glass, thereby echoing the nineteenth-century glass and wrought iron skylight of the gallery space above—that reflect the surrounding space at different angles, Bove’s sculptures simultaneously take in and intervene with their environment, eliding disappearance and disruption.
The installation includes a three-dimensional construction of a “Rubin’s vase,” the well-known optical illusion first developed in the early twentieth century by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin. The image can be read as either two opposing faces, or a vase—their shared boundary results in an unstable reversal of figure and ground. This ambiguous perceptual relationship relates to the paradoxes and ellisions at play in the overall installation between positive and negative space, and the apprehension of form versus gestalt.
The adjacent galleries will feature an installation of wall-mounted sculptures in colorful matte finishes that paradoxically render the steel tubing as if it were effortlessly malleable. The walls have been covered in a gray-mauve linen that offsets the bright pink, yellow, and orange hues of the sculptures. The vibrating colors of their contorted, folded steel surfaces alternately seem to reference those found on contemporary industrial products, and the luminous, hyperreal pinks, yellows, and faded mauves of late nineteenth-century paintings by artists such as Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard, while their forms simultaneously register to the eye almost like digitally rendered, Photoshopped images. The oscillating associations of distinct historically and technologically bounded references is further emphasized by the relationship between the works’ physical status as sculptures and their connections to painting in their representational evocation of brushstrokes and their technical experimentation with applied color, light, and shadow.
These sculptures moreover operate on inverse registers of display, chroma, and scale to the installation in the main gallery, further speaking to the physical and perceptual dualities, contradictions, and slippages at play in the overall exhibition. Together, the works on view further Bove’s engagement with the limits of physicality and perception, and attest to the artist’s ongoing exploration of the possibilities of abstract sculpture.
Born in 1971 in Geneva, Carol Bove was raised in Berkeley, California, and studied at New York University. Between 2009 and 2013, she was a clinical associate professor of studio art in Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU. The artist joined David Zwirner in 2011. In 2015, The Plastic Unit marked her first solo exhibition at the gallery’s London location, which was followed in 2016 by Polka Dots, her first solo show with the gallery in New York. The artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery was presented in London in 2018. Her 2019 Hong Kong exhibition Ten Hours was the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery and her first in Asia. In 2021, two concurrent exhibitions, titled Chimes at Midnight and Carol Bove, were on view at the gallery’s West 20th Street and 69th Street locations in New York.
Also in 2021, four works by the artist were installed in the façade niches of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled Carol Bove: The séances aren’t helping, it was the second in a new series of site-specific commissions for the museum. From 2021 to 2022, two of Bove’s sculptures, The Bicycle (2016) and Will’s Dog (2017), were on long-term view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas presented Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures in 2021.
Bove’s work was on view in 2019 alongside John Chamberlain’s in a two-person presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Also in 2019, the artist was invited to participate in the 58th Venice Biennale, which featured a focused selection of recent work. In 2014, The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, with Museion, Bolzano, Italy, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium, organized an exhibition with Carol Bove and Carlo Scarpa. Venues that have hosted significant solo exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); The Common Guild, Glasgow (2013); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); Tate St Ives, England (2009); Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin (2006); Kunsthalle Zürich (2004); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2004). The artist’s first major museum presentation was held at Kunstverein Hamburg in 2003. Group exhibitions featuring Bove’s work include the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012); the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008).
The artist’s large-scale sculptures are often exhibited outdoors and in public spaces. In 2020, four of Bove’s works were installed on the Claremont McKenna College campus in Claremont, California. At the 2018 edition of Unlimited at Art Basel, Bove debuted a monumental sculpture. In 2017, the artist’s sculptures were installed in the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria, The Contemporary Austin. That same year, her work was on view in Women of Venice at the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, where she was invited to respond to the legacy of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. Bove’s steel-beam sculpture Lingam (2015) was installed in City Hall Park in New York as part of the 2016 group exhibition The Language of Things, organized by Public Art Fund. In 2013, she created a series of sculptures for the High Line at the Rail Yards in New York.
Work by the artist is represented in permanent collections worldwide, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; FRAC Grand Large - Hauts-de-France, Dunkirk, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. She lives and works in New York City.
Image: Carol Bove, Hardware Romance, 2021 (detail)
