LONDON.- Gagosian announced a solo presentation of new large-scale works by Carol Bove at Frieze London 2024.

Bove’s installation comprises a group of nine approximately ten-foot-tall abstract sculptures titled Grove I–Grove IX. Each slender, vertically oriented form incorporates a chain, a painted disc, or one of the artist’s now-familiar painted and partially crumpled square-profile stainless-steel tubes, each of which has been attached to a cluster of raw mild steel fragments. Bove conceived the new sculptures with both indoor and outdoor settings in mind, and with the expectation that, in the latter case, viewers’ perceptions of them would change along with the seasons, the treated and untreated elements of each one advancing or receding visually in accordance with ambient environmental coloration. While distinguishing the natural from the digital does not usually pose a problem, these works contrast the former—in the shape of raw steel, or of steel painted so that it blends in with its environment—with the vividly colored tubes’ and discs’ occasionally “digital” appearance of flawlessness. The artificiality of the fair booth further challenges our perception of these distinctions.

Since the early 2000s, Bove has focused on precisely this kind of interdependence of artworks and their contexts. A poetic use of artifacts and materials including found objects and industrial hardware, along with an acute awareness of architectural sites and modes of display, continues to steer her practice. Embracing the strategies of modernist formalism as a point of departure, her current metal sculptures explore previously overlooked openings in the conventional narrative of art history. Many also have appropriated titles that contribute further layers of cultural reference.

Just as The Machine Age, Bove’s exhibition at Gagosian’s gallery in Gstaad in February, was arranged with various possible sight lines in mind, so the works at Frieze London have been choreographed to prompt a range of perspectives and juxtapositions. This strategic placement also helps deepen the works’ formal conversation with Art Deco, Memphis, Minimalism, and less-recognized tendencies such as public “plaza art.” Additionally, it echoes Bolton Landing, a former fox farm in New York’s Adirondack Mountains in which sculptor David Smith (1906–1965) maintained a studio, often arranging his sculptures in the surrounding fields. As in other of Bove’s recent sculptures, the component tubes’ matte urethane paint finish lends them an impression of flexibility and softness—especially in contrast to their rough-edged, uncolored companions—while their quasi-organic surfaces generate a subtly anthropomorphic look. The sculptures’ divergent finishes also continue to spark questions around the assumed “inherent” qualities of familiar materials.

Carol Bove was born in 1971 in Geneva, and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Austin, TX; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, Spain; and Longlati Foundation, Shanghai. Exhibitions include The Science of Being and the Art of Living, Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2003); Kunsthalle Zürich (2004); Momentum 1: Carol Bove, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2004); WorkSpace: Carol Bove: “setting” for A. Pomodoro, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin (2006); Tate St Ives, England (2009); Prix Lafayette 2009: Carol Bove, La traversée difficile, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); The Equinox, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); Caterpillar, High Line at the Rail Yards, New York (2013); Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria, Contemporary Austin, TX (2017); and Collage Sculptures, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021–22).