Contemporary Art Daily

Kimmerich is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition with Carol Bove, and her first with the gallery in its New York City location.

In this most recent display of sculptures, Bove deepens her curiosity for the conditions by which specific materials both emerge from and return to culture. Gathering anachronisms from codified moments of history such as Classical Antiquity, 30s fashion, the Renaissance, and Surrealism, Bove engages in a promiscuous relationship with taste. These arrangements of referential abstractions resolve her aesthetic exploration.

In the entrance of the gallery, a piece of rusted metal stands on a concrete plinth and an opulent bronze base brings the sculpture into human scale. The sculpture is an exquisite corpse: one element nods to corporate lobby art, another to Brutalist architecture, and yet another to a mysterious origin. As these elements retain their disparate pasts and conflicting qualities, they converge in the present, surpassing differences in time and place.

“Harlequin” and “Harlequin” consist of two massive cast acrylic prisms layered with an exterior of expanded sheet metal. When layered, the pattern of the steel vibrates so that a two dimensional illusion emerges from the sculpture.

Towards the back of the gallery, two steel stands display seashells like a stationary mobile. Unlike the brass stands Bove has previously used to exhibit sand dollars and corals, these steel armatures are crafted to the shells by their unique forms in such a manner that the steel seems organic.

In the back exhibition room hangs “Tears,” a row of handmade silver beaded chains, and “Untitled”, a linen panel covered in peacock feathers. The works are both eight by four feet, a dimension that is standard for the industrial components of “Harlequin” but seems significant for these handmade works. The peacock feathers saturate the linen, while the beads in “Tears” reflect light throughout the room. However, both works coalesce into a cohesive pattern while retaining the delicacy of their components.

Bove’s contemporizations of cultural and historical fragments reminds us of the here and now. A personal, even emotional insistence upon relating objects and subjects suggests that one can individualize even the most collective of projects.

American artist Carol Bove was born in 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland and raised in Berkeley, California. Recent solo exhibitions include the Tate St. Ives, Blanton Museum of Art, the Kunsthalle Zürich and Boston‘s Institute of Contemporary Art as well as the Kunstverein Hamburg. Bove has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, The New Museum as well as The Museum of Modern Art.

Upcoming for 2010 Bove will be co-curating “Felix Gonzales-Torres” at the Foundation Beyeler in Basel. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.