Exploring the recent sculptural innovations of prominent contemporary artist Carol Bove

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 Center.

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.
About the Author: Catherine Craft is curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas and a scholar of Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and Neo-Dada. She is the author of An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism (2012) and Robert Rauschenberg (2013).

Known for works that incorporate found and constructed elements with a unique formal, technical, and conceptual inventiveness, Carol Bove (b. 1971) stands as one of the foremost contemporary artists working today; her work has consistently challenged and expanded the possibilities of formal abstraction. On view through November 2021, are four works by the artist installed in the facade niches of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled Carol Bove: The séances aren't helping, it is the second in a new series of site-specific commissions for the museum.

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, editor, and public speaker. She is inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Between 2010 and 2017 Le Feuvre was Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, where she directed the research component of the largest artist-endowed foundation in Europe, leading a program of education, research, collections, publications and exhibitions.