Carol Bove

This book was published on the occasion of Carol Bove at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the first museum survey of the artist’s work. Curated by Katherine Brinson with support from Charlotte Youkilis and Bellara Huang, the exhibition traces key shifts across Bove’s twenty-five-year career, which encompasses works ranging from delicate assemblages and collages to large-scale steel sculptures. Throughout, Bove investigates the workings of perception via her playful experiments with surface, scale, and color, while making use of the building’s interior as a sculpture in its own right.

Edited by Brinson, the two-volume catalogue featuring 130 color images is housed in a die-cut slipcase, which includes a unique, diamond-shaped paper element selected and hand-cut by Bove for the first-edition printing. The first volume contains illustrated essays by Kelly Baum, Brinson, Cathleen Chaffee, Jennifer Y. Chuong, Huang, Suzanne Hudson, and Mariët Westermann on aspects of Bove’s work, including the significance of shelves in her early assemblages, the peculiarities of surface in her recent sculpture, and her gardener-like approach to the use of contextual space. The second volume, an artist’s book conceived by Bove, reproduces actual-size details of artworks and a series of recent paper collages, which explore, in the artist’s words, “scale; color; arguably, surface; and, to a limited extent, shape.”