PHOTOGRAPHY: RACHEL CHANDLER WRITER: CAROLINE ROUX
STEEL PULSE
American artist Carol Bove on crushing, crashing
and twisting heavy metal into better shapeOn a snowy day in March, all sorts of things
are happening in Carol Bove’s studio. An
assistant in a white Tyvek suit is stripping
down a sculpture – one of the seven lively
blue forms that stood like an abstract family
outside the Swiss Pavilion in Venice during
the 2017 art biennale. Another is welding a
huge steel tube, which seems to have writhed
into submission, crushed and doubled up
on itself. Gordon Terry, Bove’s husband and
the studio’s managing partner, is showing
a couple around the huge space. ‘He has
oversight,’ says Bove, ‘but he’s really doing
his own stuff right now.’ Terry, also an artist,
is currently studying philosophy. ‘We talk
about Kant all the time,’ adds Bove. She’s
laughing, but in all seriousness, her work
is as much about the psychological as it
is about occupying and disrupting the
space around it, asking for an unconscious
response to its often unlikely presence.
Bove’s career has fairly cantered along
since she completed her art studies at New
York University in 2000. She first gained
attention with her sparse arrangements
on plain wooden bookshelves: magazines and
publications from the 1960s and 1970s, and
peacock feathers and shells, like minimalist
cabinets of curiosity. Her work has since
grown in scale as she works heavy metal into
increasingly light forms. In 2013, for the final
section of the High Line, she created six giant
sculptures, including a Loch Ness Monster-
style multiple loop of steel that spoke the
same language as the old rail tracks and
urban detritus around them. Last year, she
reworked a classical sculpture garden at the
Contemporary Austin in Texas with more
steel loops, metal pieces finished in velvety
car paint and elegant minimalist grids.
Born in Geneva in 1971, albeit to American
parents, Bove was eligible to represent
Switzerland in Venice, and she has referred
to herself as ‘spiritually Swiss’, though she
mostly grew up near San Francisco. Her
studio, 1,580 sq m in all, is in the outlying,
artist-favoured Brooklyn neighbourhood
of Red Hook. On the waterfront, and cut-off
by distance and a distinct lack of public
transport, the area has the feel of a slightly
abandoned seaside town, though some
houses have now been architecturally
enhanced and there are a sprinkling of cool
oyster bars and smart wine shops. »ARTIST CAROL BOVE
WITH ONE OF HER WORKS IN
PROGRESS IN HER STUDIO
IN RED HOOK, BROOKLYN∑ 093
Art