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Photo by Andreas Laszlo Konrath
"Here's a good purse hanger," said the artist Carol Bove on a recent morning in Brooklyn, resting her hand fondly on the handle of an industrial hydraulic press. She still wasn't sure of its intended use, but she's found it to be especially handy as both a handbag tree and for coercing giant tubes of steel to her artistic will.
A sculptor who specializes in "big, heavy, but fragile" works, as she described them, Bove was born in Geneva—it was announced this week that she will represent Switzerland in next year's Venice Biennale–but she grew up primarily in Berkeley, California, a culture that has long informed her work. But in the last 10 years, another place has affected her art: Bove was one of the first of the wave of artists to move to Red Hook, a somewhat removed part of Brooklyn that's since become home to an Ikea, a Fairway, and spaces like Pioneer Works, but was better known as a yard for feral, wild dogs when Bove was first getting settled. (There wasn't a grocery store for miles.)
Not that she minded. It only meant more room to spread, which she's done consistently over the last decade, from her nearby home to a handful of indoor and outdoor studios. Her latest addition—the vaulted former glass fabrication factory we stood in that morning—has enough space not just for the comparatively tiny hydraulic press, but for Bove's tallest and largest works to date: combinations of found, manipulated, and fabricated steel that clock in at up to 1,500 pounds, and which have since been transported to two of David Zwirner's galleries in Chelsea for "Polka Dots," her show opening on Saturday.
These new assemblages, which she's dubbed "collage sculptures," are without question Bove's most ambitious works yet, putting her in the realm of heavyweight, overwhelmingly male sculptor forebears like John Chamberlain. Previously, she'd been working almost exclusively with found objects like paperbacks, driftwood, and peacock feather, which she'd then reframe with brass and steel—"tasteful" installations that, around a year and a half ago, Bove decided had arrived at a point of diminishing returns.
"I was sick of them," Bove said of her past constructions, some of which were at the center of a much raved about 2013 installation at MoMA. "I wanted to see something that's actually kind of garish and tacky, and the stuff I was doing was tending much more toward this kind of romantic, elegant set of registers. I wanted to open it up."