Carol Bove, a New York–based sculptor who plays with mystical elements of scale and materiality, has joined Gagosian gallery for global representation after a 12-year relationship with fellow mega-gallery David Zwirner.
The move ends Bove’s arrangement with Zwirner, with which she signed on for co-representation with Maccarone gallery in 2011, and which featured her first solo show in London in 2015.
In an announcement, Larry Gagosian said, “Carol Bove is a leading voice in sculpture today. 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.”
Bove’s first show with Gagosian will open in November at the gallery’s Park & 75 location in Manhattan, a short subway ride from “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” an exhibition co-curated and designed by Bove that opens October 4 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gagosian will also feature new sculpture of Bove’s in October at Paris+ par Art Basel, “integrating her work within the context of the gallery’s wider historical program,” according to an announcement.
Born in Geneva and raised in Berkeley, California, Bove has been based in New York since 1993. Her work with found objects and finely rendered materials has involved different modes of display, ranging from bookshelves stocked with esoteric countercultural tomes to columns and plinths that serve as sculpture in and of themselves. Her recent work in steel has evolved in terms of size and form, with numerous sculptures shaped and painted in ways that twist perception and play with tensions between dynamism and stillness.
Her work featured in Documenta in 2012, when she exhibited four outdoor sculptures inspired by 18-century statues of mythological gods, and on New York’s High Line, where in 2013 she installed glyph-like sculptures in a then-undeveloped part of the park. In 2021, Bove installed a series of contorted steel tubes adorned with reflective aluminum disks in empty niches at the Met in New York (under the title The séances aren’t helping) and presented “Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.