NEW YORK, NY.- Carol Bove is the first museum survey and largest exhibition to date of the work of American artist Carol Bove (b. 1971, Geneva, Switzerland; lives and works in New York). The presentation transforms the entire Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda, with sculptures, installations, paintings, and works on paper integrated into an exhibition design that foregrounds the unique spatial dynamics of Wright’s architecture. It traces pivotal shifts in the artist’s career across more than 25 years and debuts two new bodies of work: a monumental group of her steel compositions known as “collage sculptures” conceived for the space and a series of wall-mounted aluminum panel works. Bove’s inventive practice ranges widely, from assemblages of paperback books and intimate paper collages to towering metal sculptures. She explores the workings of perception through her experiments with surface, color, scale, and space, inviting viewers into moments of heightened imaginative awareness.
As Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Global Initiatives, states, “This survey exhibition marks the first opportunity to see the full arc of Bove’s career, putting her early and more recent bodies of work in generative dialogue. At the same time, it coheres into a single artistic statement, animating the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral with color and form while creating opportunities for rest and active play.”
The Guggenheim’s spiral rotunda offers a resonant setting for Bove’s long-standing interest in tuning the relationship between objects and their surroundings. The artist approaches the rotunda as a sculpture in its own right, subtly activating its distinctive geometries and open sight lines, which allow works to remain visually connected across levels. The exhibition is presented in a loose reverse chronology of Bove’s career, winding backwards in time from new sculptures on the museum’s lower ramps to drawings and installations made in the early 2000s at the top. As the viewer progresses upward, the material presence of the artworks gradually lightens, with large-scale steel abstractions giving way to compositions formed from fragile beads, feathers, and thread. This feeling of ascension is echoed in the gradated gray paint that has been applied to the spiral ramp’s back wall, which progressively shifts from dark to light. Within this setting, six polished aluminum disks rise through the rotunda in a vertical column. Originally created as elements of a group of sculptures commissioned for the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade in 2021, the reflective disks activate the Guggenheim’s geometries, drawing the viewer’s eye upward to the museum’s skylight.
Art-historical research is central to Bove’s work, and she has regularly curated major presentations of the work of other artists. At the Guggenheim, Bove has incorporated a number of works by artists from earlier generations—including Bruce Conner, Agnes Martin, and Édouard Vuillard—to appear alongside her own, foregrounding her engagement with cultural histories and visual languages that are continually reshaped in the present. Bove will partially reveal a site-specific mural by Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas from 1965–67 that was built into the first bay of the Guggenheim’s spiral ramps and has not been on view for more than 23 years. The mural was commissioned by Harry F. Guggenheim, then president of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in memory of his wife, Alicia. Bove has created a diamond-shaped cutout in the wall that offers visitors a framed view of the mural. This diamond form becomes the anchor for the column of silver disks that rise above it.
Attentive to the visitor’s journey over more than a quarter mile up the museum’s sloping ramps, Bove has incorporated spaces for rest, reflection, and play into the exhibition. These include comfortable seating built into the architecture, a tactile library with materials from the artist’s studio to explore and handle, and artist-designed chess sets on the rotunda floor that visitors are invited to play.
Carol Bove will be accompanied by public programs that activate the Guggenheim’s rotunda as a site for performance, community, and experiential learning. In March, the renowned choreographer Lucinda Childs will present a rotunda performance as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival with Works & Process and Guggenheim New York. Childs’s Early Works will be presented against the backdrop of the Bove exhibition, highlighting rhythm and geometry in both creative practices.
On April 11, audiences are invited to experience the dynamic vocal ensemble Khorikos performing in the museum as part of Carnegie Hall’s Well-Being Concerts series, which blends world-class musical performances with elements of deep listening and mindfulness. On the second Saturday of each month, parents and caregivers with young children are exclusively invited to Stroller Hour to experience the exhibition before the museum opens to the public. Visitors can enjoy early access in a welcoming environment, followed by a guided art-making activity designed to nurture creative play, discovery, and intergenerational connection.
On the occasion of this exhibition, the Guggenheim will publish an expansive two-volume catalogue housed in a die-cut slipcase inspired by Bove’s distinctive use of geometry and color. For the first edition, each case will feature a paper element that the artist has personally selected and hand cut into a diamond shape, making every copy a unique object. Contained within are two books that offer complementary perspectives on the artist’s influential body of work. The first contextualizes Bove’s practice across seven illustrated scholarly essays by Kelly Baum, Katherine Brinson, Cathleen Chaffee, Jennifer Y. Chuong, Bellara Huang, Suzanne Hudson, and Mariët Westermann, accompanied by an extensive selected exhibition history and bibliography. The second, an artist’s book conceived by Bove, features immersive photographic details of her works printed at the real-life scale of the objects they represent, interleaved with a series of paper collages that distill a key aspect of the artist’s process.
Carol Bove is organized by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Senior Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Global Initiatives, with support from Charlotte Youkilis, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, and Bellara Huang, former Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions.
