Using everything from 30-million-year-old trees to white loop the loops, Bove's easy-on-the-eye artworks could easily be plopped down in a corporate plaza. But they're so much more intriguing than that
A 30-million-year-old petrified tree trunk is bolted to a vertical steel I-beam. It's a brown thing climbing another brown thing, standing on the wooden floor at David Zwirner gallery in Mayfair. Nearby, a white steel tube does a loop the loop. This is called Noodle. My eye sucks it up like spaghetti.
Carol Bove calls these immaculate white sculptures Glyphs, and they look a bit like a child's first rounded attempts at joined-up writing, redone in fetish-finish fabricated steel. Their easy-on-the-eye abstraction also recalls the kind of upbeat art that gets plopped down in public squares and corporate plazas, as much a logo for art as art itself. They have all the meaning of an uncoiled spring, and could almost go anywhere. Bove is aware of this.
The American artist currently has two shows in the UK. The other, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, pairs Bove with the Venetian modernist architect, designer and artist Carlo Scarpa (1906-78). Juxtaposing Scarpa's artworks and utilitarian design objects with her own art, and incorporating his work with hers, Bove both honours a predecessor and takes him on a journey. Bove's is an art of constant returns and repetitions. Going from room to room, and gallery to gallery, I'm stricken by a growing sense of déjà vu. There's another Glyph, and a second totemic tree-trunk and I-beam looming in Leeds.
One large concrete sculpture stands on the downstairs floor at Zwirner, while a different version hangs around in the Henry Moore Institute's lobby, as though waiting to be let in. Each of them could easily take centre stage and fill a room on its own. Instead, Bove places them in such a way that downplays their monumentality, until we get up close. Both sculptures consist of two boxy concrete cuboids, one atop the other. The upper concrete section breaks up into smaller blocks, steps and elevations, like some kind of fantasy architecture hewn from a mountain. Walking round them, we're surprised by groups of little bolted-together open brass cubes or cells, climbing around the concrete ledges. They seem to proliferate as we look.