If you walk from the ground floor to the top of the Guggenheim Museum’s winding ramp, you will have walked a quarter-mile uphill. And perhaps you will want to rest your legs or even take a nap. Carol Bove, a sculptor whose work is about to fill the six-story rotunda, feels your pain.
On a recent afternoon, she was standing on one of the museum’s upper levels, looking at a pile of tweedy wool cushions designed for five lounges she is installing in galleries normally reserved for art.
Bove is one of the country’s most imaginative and esteemed sculptors, and her retrospective, opening on March 5, is a two-pronged affair, surveying some 25 years of her work while treating Frank Lloyd Wright’s dreamy spiral of a building as a place that could stand more than a few home improvements, especially in the seating department.
“Museums are so off-putting,” Bove said. “I think it goes all the way back to Plato, who believed the body was really inferior to the soul.”
All of this might lead you to wonder when, exactly, artists shed their popular image as truculent rebels and took up the passions of interior decorators. But Bove (which is pronounced bo -VAY), 54, believes that the mind-body split that has long underpinned Western medicine and culture has led museums, however unintentionally, to design spaces that are hostile to the needs of your body. And though her art is brainy and rarefied, she has planned her current show as a buoyantly feel-good affair that prioritizes the human desire to sit or lie down. “I want to make people feel welcomed and accommodated,” she said.
In addition to the new lounges, the show will offer an occasional herbal tea service and a “touching library” where you can handle chunks of cut steel, peacock feathers, and other of Bove’s art materials, in defiance of the do-not-touch prohibitions of the past.
So too, you can play chess on five round coffee tables, inlaid with alternating brass squares that give off a golden sheen. Bove designed them to visually rhyme with the soothing circular geometry of the Wright’s rotunda, “a temple of the spirit,” to borrow a phrase from Hilla Rebay, its first director.
Bove, a Bay Area transplant who lives in New York, is sympathetic, but thinks Wright overlooked a few things. “I find museums to be full of microaggressions,” she said. “When I go to a museum and there’s no place to sit, it’s like, Who is mad at me?”
The artist has long elevated the curation of objects into its own art form. She first won a following, around 2002, for sparsely poetic installations of used paperbacks resting on wall-mounted Danish wood shelves. These days, she is known mainly for her “pipe monsters,” monumental sculptures in which long tubes of industrial steel are bent and compressed into surprisingly crinkly configurations. They’re made with the help of two 100-ton hydraulic presses in her studio, harking back to that postwar heyday when sculptors like Richard Serra and Mark di Suvero found inspiration in the virile spectacle of the United States’ infrastructure. But Bove extracts something entirely new from steel, dispelling its aura of brawn. Her signature form is a rumpled, crumpled, bunched-up ribbon of metal, coated in matte automotive body paint and looking as soft as suede.
Put another way, the high finish and lush colors of her sculptures remove her from the Constructivist tradition that favored raw and rusty surfaces, and place her closer to the Surrealists, with their taste for illusion and chic design. Her spirit is one of accommodation. “I see my sculptures as having the same confidence of that of Serra and those guys,” she said, “but I don’t have anything to prove. I’m not trying to dominate the viewer. I’m working with seduction.”
As Bove tended to installation details, I sat on the rim of the lobby fountain with Katherine Brinson, a senior curator at the Guggenheim who grew up in Wales. She refers to the Bove exhibition as a “passion project” that she conceived 10 years ago. “Carol makes encounters in space that jolt you out of the everyday,” she said.
“She is the queen of titles,” she added, and it is true that Bove’s titles are layered with cultural references, from Fellini films and a Sylvia Plath poem to video games.
Take, for instance, “Sweet Charity,” a group of seven new jumbo-sized sculptures that workmen were installing in a high-ceilinged space near the lobby. One sculpture was up: It was tall, leggy and spaghetti-thin, with intimations of Giacometti’s hyper-vertical “Walking Man,” except that half of it was painted a color resembling highlighter yellow.
Puzzled by the title, which is also the name of a 1966 Broadway musical and a film that followed, I emailed Bove. She replied with a link to “Big Spender,” one of its campier numbers. Choreographed by Bob Fosse, it takes you into the fabled Fandango Ballroom, where dance-hall hostesses dressed in sequined miniskirts lean over a railing, trying to entice patrons to come inside.
Perhaps Bove was making a joke about the artistic life. Artists, as much as show girls, depend on patrons for their survival, and it helps to have “big spenders” in your corner.
Today Bove’s sculptures command upward of $1 million at Gagosian gallery, where she began showing in 2023, after 12 prolific years at the David Zwirner gallery. Her overhead eats up most of her earnings, she said. The rent on her 15,000-square-foot Red Hook studio, in the watery southern reaches of Brooklyn, is $45,000 a month, and at any given moment she employs as many as 20 skilled workers, who are offered lunch in a glass-enclosed kitchen equipped with a panini machine and other trimmings.
She is also the mother of two teenagers, whom she raised in Red Hook. A few years ago, in the midst of a divorce from the artist Gordon Terry, she moved to an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue. We joke that she has become an “East Side matron,” not least because she achieved wide renown in 2021, when she was awarded the Metropolitan Museum’s coveted Facade Commission. In her installation, “The séances aren’t helping,” her familiar metallic forms (the long, floaty tubes and shieldlike aluminum discs) struggled for balance in four limestone niches on the historic exterior, like hapless knights escaped from the Met’s arms & armor department.
In an inspired bit of recycling, Bove has reworked six reflective discs from the Met sculptures — each five feet in diameter—into décor for the Guggenheim. Perched at the edge of consecutive floors, they line up vertically to form an art-deco column that stretches to the ceiling. It is a dazzling object conjuring both the whirring gears of the machine age, and the radiant sun rising again and again. And perhaps, too, the invisible mystical beyond suggested in the work of Wassily Kandinsky and other founders of abstract painting.
The subject turns to spirituality and Bove tells me she is a devoted Buddhist who is fond of meditation, which does not preclude empirical study. “I think of myself as being very scientific in my approach,” she told me. “And I am my favorite experimental test subject.”
She is descended from a family practiced in laboratory research. Her maternal grandfather, Eugene Gardner, was a prominent nuclear physicist at the University of California who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II. According to his New York Times obituary, he died at 37, of beryllium poisoning incurred during his research.
Bove, who never met her grandfather, was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1971, when her parents were vacationing abroad. She has spent much of her life explaining to new acquaintances that she is not Swiss. Rather, she grew up in Berkeley, a daughter of the Bay Area counterculture. Her father is a housepainter who studied art in Paris. Her mother, an unpublished poet, worked as a junior-high science teacher.
Bove describes her childhood as a difficult time when she suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia and an attention deficit disorder. “I felt so stupid until really recently,” she told me. She dropped out of Berkeley High School after the 11th grade. She eventually obtained an equivalency diploma and enrolled at New York University, where she studied photography and art history and graduated at age 29.
She found a refuge in art. When she was 8, her mother arranged for drawing lessons at the home of a neighbor. “It saved me,” Bove recalled. “It really saved my spirit.” She relished visits to the Berkeley Art Museum, which offered free admission. “I could hide out,” she said. “They had comfortable chairs!” She was fascinated by an 11-foot-tall wooden plinth by the Minimalist artist John McCracken, painted, improbably, the color of strawberry ice cream.
She also admired a small sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro, the Italian modernist known for bronze spheres that appear to be violently splitting in half. This explains her “Setting for A. Pomodoro” (2006), which, at the Guggenheim, at first resembles a display of knickknacks from a West Elm catalog. Concrete blocks and metal stands juxtapose unrelated objects — a necklace, a piece of driftwood, peacock feathers and “Sphere,” an actual sculpture by Pomodoro.
The installation belongs to Bove’s early experiments with shelves and platforms, which were well-stocked with used paperbacks from the ’60s that delve into philosophy, psychology and radical politics. They form a heady reading list, “a social document of a particular, complicated moment in American culture when a short-lived, sky-high utopianism was starting to crash and burn,” wrote the critic Holland Cotter in a review of a Bove exhibition in 2003.
Coincidentally, Rashid Johnson had more than a half-dozen shelf sculptures in his recent Guggenheim retrospective. When I mentioned to Bove that her shelf pieces predate his, she waved dismissively and said that credit must go to Haim Steinbach, an artist whose shelf love runs deep. During the money-drunk ’80s, Steinbach replaced his pedestals with plastic-laminated shelves that poked fun at our instinct to put anything and everything up for sale.
It made sense that Bove wanted to acknowledge Steinbach. She is always bringing other artists —kindred spirits —into the equation. Besides Pomodoro, another surprise artist is Joan Miró. Bove has liberated his starry ceramic mural, “Alicia” (1965-7), a collaboration with Josep Lloréns y Artigas, from behind a museum wall that has covered it for decades.
And then there’s Richard Berger, a little-known Bay Area artist who in 1976 made a trippy sculpture, suspending hundreds of lead fishing weights from the ceiling to create a phantom image of a sofa. Bove first saw it as an enraptured child visiting her local museum. “It really blew my mind,” she said.
Decades later, she sought out the artist and bought the work, “My Couch,” which is in the Guggenheim show. It’s probably not a coincidence that the first piece of art she said she “really loved” offered a vision not only of silvery light, but of the comfort that comes from sitting. The comforts she feels that Wright — with all his pristine circles and squares— overlooked.
In a way, you can see Wright as another of her inspirations and collaborators, her most formidable one. I was not surprised when I opened the exhibition catalog and read her chummy dedication: “For Frank.”
Carol Bove
March 5 through Aug. 2, Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave., (212) 423-3500; guggenheim.org.
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