Carol Bove – författare

Carol Bove: Collage Sculptures presents an extensive look into the contemporary artist’s work over the past five years and her ongoing exploration of scale, color, material, and artistic traditions of the twentieth century. Bove’s recent work engages the conceptual concerns of mid-century sculpture, such as spontaneity, industrial materials, and the potential of painted sculpture. However, within this space of familiar sculptural traditions, Bove has discovered new approaches that lead to places previously unknown. Bove’s “collage sculptures” are created from scrap metal and stainless steel that has been carefully worked into sinuous forms and are frequently painted. Considering the hard rigidity of the steel, the works possess an appearance of almost impossible softness, as if steel could become as pliable as clay. Such works range from small pedestal sculptures to large, imposing compositions. Bove’s interest in scale and how a viewer’s understanding of an artwork shifts depending on its context are explored through a selection of small works from the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Sculpture.Published by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the catalogue features beautiful reproductions of Bove’s work and an introduction as well as an essay by curator Catherine Craft on the development of the collage sculptures and their relationship to other artists and traditions of modern sculpture. Also included is an essay by Lisa Le Feuvre that explores Bove’s complex work by means of a thematic alphabet related to the artist’s interests.

A museum collection seen through the artist's eyesIn 2025, the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève (MAH) awards a Carte Blanche for the fifth time: to the US-American artist Carol Bove. The museum's collection and archives are made tangible in Bove's installations. The chronologically presented works pursue artistic, anthropological, interactive, and pedagogical approaches. Between historical artifacts, masterpieces, and everyday objects, this Carte Blanche re-explores the museum space by dissolving the boundaries between art and everyday objects. The doubling of the works in the form of 3D objects that can be touched invites us to fundamentally rethink and redefine our relationship between art and museums free from conventions.