On view at the Guggenheim Museum through August 2
1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
The exhibition was organized by curators Katherine Brinson, Charlotte Youkilis, and Bellara Huang.
This summer, visitors to New York’s Guggenheim Museum will encounter one of the most ambitious sculpture exhibitions of the year: Carol Bove’s sweeping survey of her career installed throughout the museum’s iconic spiral rotunda. Though Bove’s career has spanned a range of material and form, her most recent work transforms industrial steel into work that feels fluid, soft, and unexpectedly malleable. Bove has emerged as one of the defining sculptors of her generation — “among the sculptural titans,” according to Vogue.
The exhibition is designed specifically for the Guggenheim’s architecture, with her most recent work at the base of the spiral. As visitors ascend the spiral they go back in time, witnessing Bove’s present-day work all the way back to her earliest work, witnessing the change from the heavy weight of her current metal sculptures up to her early works dealing in reassembled used books and paper — moving upward into a lighter, more ephemeral past, then descending again into the weight of the present. The work unfolds from multiple perspectives at once across the rotunda and around each curve of the ramp.
The large-scale fabricated steel forms twist, fold, and arc with remarkable tension and precision. Though monumental in scale, they often appear surprisingly flexible or improvised, as if metal has been caught rippling in the wind, tenderly bent by the breeze. Surfaces range from polished and soft to crumpled and raw.
That balance between expressive form and technical execution is central to Bove’s work, as well as to the fabrication expertise required to realize it. Many of Bove’s recent sculptures were developed in collaboration with Zahner. As an internationally recognized metal fabrication company, we are known for helping artists and architects push the limits of what can be done with metal.
For decades, we have partnered with some of the world’s leading creative voices including James Turrell, Frank Gehry, Jan Hendrix, and Gyo Obata to develop new fabrication methods capable of translating ambitious concepts into physical form. Our philosophy is visible throughout Bove’s Guggenheim exhibition, where steel behaves in ways that seem to challenge its own physical properties.
Rather than hiding the fabrication process behind the finished work, the sculptures foreground the material itself: It is bent, stressed, polished, folded, and transformed through a process that combines engineering precision with artistic experimentation.
