Guggenheim Presents Carol Bove

The artist’s first ever museum survey will bring together more than 100 works from over 25 years, including the debut of new sculptures created for the Frank Lloyd Wright building

Carol Bove will be the first museum survey and largest presentation to date of the work of American artist Carol Bove (b. 1971, Geneva, Switzerland; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY). Filling the entire Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda, the exhibition will trace pivotal shifts across Bove’s more than 25-year career, from her early drawings to a new, monumental group of her steel compositions known as “collage sculptures.” Additionally, the artist will design visual interventions that subtly reframe the experience of navigating the museum’s spiral ramps, reflecting her long-standing interest in the way objects are transformed by their surroundings.

Encompassing more than 100 works, this expansive survey will be the first comprehensive overview of the formal and conceptual development of Bove’s career. The artist’s work is entwined with the dynamics of a given site, and she has often incorporated context-specific elements, including adjustments to architectural settings and immersive exhibition designs, into her practice. Throughout the Guggenheim installation, Bove will punctuate the visitor’s journey with spaces for rest, contemplation, and interaction. Lounges will be built directly into several bays on the spiral ramps, while a group of artist-made chess sets will be available for visitors to play at leisure on the rotunda floor.

As Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Global Initiatives, states, “While Carol Bove’s career has been marked by restless experimentation and a number of distinct formal pivots, her central focus has remained the same: the creation of vivid perceptual encounters that pry open new imaginative relationships to objects, images, and ideas. Not only will this exhibition be the first opportunity to see Bove’s early and more recent bodies of work in dialogue, it will also cohere into an overarching artwork in its own right and a collaboration of sorts with Frank Lloyd Wright, whose sculptural building remains a generative invitation for artistic engagement.”

Bove’s work spans many mediums and formal approaches but is unified by an exacting play of material, scale, color, and space. The artist places these elements in dialogue with cultural histories and the viewer’s imagination, inviting a reconsideration of habitual ways of seeing the world. In the early 2000s, Bove gained recognition with a series of installations featuring books and ephemera placed in relational compositions on tables and wall-mounted shelves. Foregrounding material from the late 1960s and early 1970s, these “shelf” sculptures evoke a period of accelerated cultural change in American society. In subsequent years, Bove created assemblages of found objects—including shells, peacock feathers, and driftwood—that integrate platforms and plinths, transforming these display devices into sculptural forms. The exhibition will feature notable examples from this body of work, including Setting for A. Pomodoro (2006), The Foamy Saliva of a Horse (2011), and The Equinox (2013).

In 2012, Bove began to create abstract sculptures of white, looping forms known as “glyphs,” a new iteration of which will be installed outside the museum, near the entrance. More recently, the artist has devoted much of her focus to the aforementioned “collage sculptures”—compositions that combine sheaves of rusted scrap metal with square steel tubing and glossy steel disks. Working with custom-designed tools and processes in her Brooklyn studio, Bove manipulates these industrial elements into gestural forms that defy the rigidity of their material. A suite of large-scale collage sculptures created in response to the Frank Lloyd Wright building will debut on the occasion of this exhibition.

Over the past two decades, Bove has regularly curated major presentations of the work of other artists including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carlo Scarpa, and Harry Smith. Drawing upon this aspect of her practice, the Guggenheim installation will incorporate selected works by artistic antecedents who continue to be formative to Bove’s thinking.

On the occasion of this exhibition, the Guggenheim will publish an expansive two-volume catalogue housed in a die-cut slipcase inspired by the artist’s distinctive use of geometry and color. For the first edition, these cases will feature paper ephemera elements Bove has personally selected and hand cut into diamond shapes, making each copy a unique object. Contained within are two books that offer complementary but autonomous perspectives on the artist’s influential body of work. The first will contextualize her practice across seven illustrated scholarly essays by Kelly Baum, Katherine Brinson, Cathleen Chaffee, Jennifer Y. Chuong, Bellara Huang, Suzanne Hudson, and Mariët Westermann, accompanied by an extensive selected exhibition history and bibliography. The second, an artist’s book conceived by Bove, will feature immersive photographic details of her works printed at the real-life scale of the objects they represent, interleaved with a series of paper collages that distill a key aspect of the artist’s process.

Carol Bove is organized by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Global Initiatives, with support from Charlotte Youkilis, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, and Bellara Huang, former Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions.

Support

Major support for Carol Bove is provided by The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, Nancy and Steve Crown, Gagosian, and Sarah Simmons.

Support is also generously provided by Barbara Bluhm-Kaul, Leslie Bluhm, Meredith Bluhm, The Deborah Buck Foundation, The Kate Cassidy Foundation, Natasha and François-Xavier de Mallmann, Girlfriend Fund, The John & Amy Griffin Foundation, Meryl and Andrew B. Rose, and an anonymous donor.

Funding is provided by Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei, Mr. and Mrs. Lee Broughton, Charlotte Feng Ford, Kaitlyn and Mike Krieger, Lebowitz-Aberly Family Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, Melony and Adam Lewis, Steve Pulimood, Pete and Michelle Scantland, Fern and Lenard Tessler, and Wagner Foundation.

Additional funding is provided by Bonnie and R. Derek Bandeen, Ann Ames, Christy Ferer, Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Eric Michael and Craig Kruger, Dr. Frederico Wasserman, The Blue Rider Group at Morgan Stanley, and the Guggenheim Constellation Council.

Exhibition paint is provided by Farrow & Ball. Exhibition fabric is provided by Kvadrat.

About the Artist

Carol Bove was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1971 and raised in Berkeley, California. She relocated to New York in 1992 and earned a BS from New York University in 2000. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021–22); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); The High Line, New York (2013–14); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013–14); the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2006); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2004); and Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (2003), among other institutions. Group exhibitions include those held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019–20); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2013–14); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2013–14); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (2012–13); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (2012–13); Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2011); Tate St Ives, England (2009); Tate Britain, London (2008); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); The Kitchen, New York (2007); New Museum, New York (2007–08); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), Long Island City, New York (2004 and 2005); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004). The artist participated in the exhibitions Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim (2015) and Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum (2010) and has three artworks in the Guggenheim’s collection. Bove lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Guggenheim New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Guggenheim Bilbao; and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. A “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet, the Guggenheim New York is among a group of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To learn more about the Guggenheim New York and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.

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