An ideal pairing of architecture and sculpture: the Guggenheim’s hugely pleasurable retrospective of Carol Bove.
She works with steel as if it were clay or cloth, and has arranged the sculptures in a beautifully phrased sequence up Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. An amazing moment - seen in the last image here - is a diamond-shaped window revealing Joan Miró’s ceramic mural Alicia (1965–67), normally hidden behind a wall and not seen for 23 years.
The interpretive texts are unusually good, too. Here’s one about Bove’s quasi industrial methods of shaping:
“While the steel sculptures on this ramp appear to have been gesturally molded by hand, their creation requires immense mechanical force.
In her studio, located in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, Bove uses an ambitious system of custom hoists, gantries, and hydraulic presses to encourage her exceptionally heavy and rigid material to behave in unexpected ways. Despite these feats of production, she aims for forms that register as light and improvised, even effortless. The resulting works often appear to have an almost bodily softness, with disarmingly ambiguous surfaces that recall pliable flesh, folds of drapery, or even digital renderings. This perceptual gap-between our assumptions about how steel should function and what we see-disrupts habitual ways of looking. For Bove, such an encounter with an artwork might open a more flexible and embodied way of engaging with the world. “What we know about the material is contradicted,” she explains. “So maybe our grip on reality should be a little lighter, too, enabling us to see what is in front of us rather than only what we think we see.”
@bovecarole @guggenheim 
