Art Review

A smaller survey would have allowed for something more meaningful than just showing what Bove has been doing for the past decades.

There was a moment in the Guggenheim’s sprawling new Carol Bove exhibition when the entire show began to make sense to me. It was when I chanced upon “10 Hours” (2019). Located on the museum’s third ramp, it consists of a hollow, crimped and bent rectangular tube, painted banana yellow, that’s been draped over an upright stanchion of roughly cut steel with a rust patina. It could be a bath towel that someone flung onto a drying rack after an ocean swim, which makes it befuddling: I know that this listless form is made of steel covered in urethane paint, but it doesn’t look like it or behave as I expect it to. It’s wondrous that Bove has taken material used in the construction of buildings, firearms, and bridges and made it feel like a piece of fabric nonchalantly deposited and forgotten. I found myself walking for quite a while before I encountered such revelatory work again.

“Field Figures” (2008) is a combination of driftwood and steel, rising up tall from a flat steel base wherein the metal acts as struts holding up the weathered timber, as if it’s a memorial that will be discovered after a worldwide ecological apocalypse. It is forlorn and sad in a way that reflects almost every shrine: It recognizes that something or someone is no more. “Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep” (2013), which mixes brass and concrete, appeared at first to be a scale model for a brutalist building, with some decorative elements, when I approached it from one side. However, circling it, it transformed into a labyrinthine collection of open, uniform bunkers concealed inside a small city turned away from the sunlight. 

“The Night Sky Over New York” (2007) is a breathtaking combination of metallic elements. A square arrangement of long bronze needles hangs from a steel armature by bronze filaments; the whole feels like a cosmic rainfall frozen in time. An almost opposite register of material defines “Untitled (The Middle Pillar)” (2007), a carpet of peacock feathers lain on the ground, delicate and gossamer. They are full of color, the feathers’ vibrancy held in check because they are beneath me — it feels wrong to place them where visitors’ incautious feet could tread on them and destroy their natural elegance.

Bove is not indifferent to the faculty of touch. She and lead curator Katherine Brinson wisely devised a tactile library where visitors are allowed to handle materials from the artist’s studio. While investigating it, a museum staff member showed me a scaled-down version of a machine that Bove uses to crumple and fold steel and samples of her various paints. A few other pieces that visitors are allowed to touch are scattered throughout the exhibition. I enjoyed being able to pluck the string of a “monochord” instrument made for a 2023 exhibition Bove co-curated at the Whitney Museum on the work of artist Harry Smith.

Works by other artists are installed throughout the show — Agnes Martin, Édouard Vuillard, Bruce Connor — as if in an ongoing dialogue with Bove, deepening the meaning of her art. In fact, in the first bay of the spiral ramp