Carol Bove: Ten Hours

David Zwirner is pleased to present new sculptures by American artist Carol Bove (b. 1971) at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. Spanning two floors, this exhibition marks the New York–based artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery and her first in Asia. The exhibition follows her participation in this year’s Venice Biennale, which featured a focused selection of recent work, and a two-person exhibition currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Known for works that incorporate found and constructed elements with a unique formal, technical, and conceptual inventiveness, Bove stands as one of the foremost contemporary artists working today; her 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artist mines the expressive potential of materials and encourages different narrative events to emerge… Her works carry historical references and the history of the material themselves, yet her output is arrestingly singular.”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 characterized by square steel tubing that has been crushed and manipulated, painted in vibrant color, and 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. 

Read more

Image: Installation view, Carol Bove: Ten Hours, David Zwirner, Hong Kong, 2019