Ten Hours by American Contemporary Artist Carol Bove

Description

Bove’s work has consistently challenged and expanded the possibilities of formal abstraction. As Johanna Burton notes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, “The artist mines the expressive potential of materials and encourages different narrative events to emerge… Her works carry historical references and the history of the material themselves, yet her output is arrestingly singular.”

For this exhibition, Bove expands upon her ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” compositions of various types of steel, begun in 2016. These works are variously combined with found pieces of scrap metal and, often, a smooth, highly polished steel disk. Playing with surface texture and pushing the limits of steel’s physicality, the artist’s new work continues her exploration of form and process, including folding and crushing steel into more complex compositions and rendering the material with an almost fabric- or clay-like, supple finish. Bove applies similar manipulations in her use of color to engage perception, experimenting with its illusory effects and possibilities. As the artist states, “[My] intention is to approximate a palette that would make sense in a digital context, on a screen. At the same time, I choose colors that remind me of outdated print technology, and I play with combining colors that interfere with one another in the same way color-separation printing can fail and cause frictions between areas of applied color.”