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Photo by Tony Cenicola
A visit to the sculptor Carol Bove's studio in a former brick factory near the Brooklyn waterfront does not exactly make Rimbaud's advice for the true artist—to engage in a "boundless and systematized disorganization of all the senses"—leap to mind. A huge manufacturing floor dominated by an overhead gantry that looks as if it could hoist a subway car, the place instead evokes distinctly unpoetic phrases like "productivity gains" and "customer fulfillment strategies."
But Ms. Bove, 45, whose pieces have become widely celebrated in recent years, collected by the Museum of Modern Art and shown at the Venice Biennale, is also known to keep a small trampoline in the studio, one of her esoteric strategies for "dissolving my sense of separateness from the world," as she describes the prison of habitual, or even rational, thinking. In an essay she wrote last year for younger artists, she added that over the years, she has also tried out "Ayurvedic principles, philosophy, Feldenkrais technique, anthropology, astrology, the physiology of perception, contemplating life as a cave man, health-food regimens, psychedelic experiences, reading self-help books, eBay, falling in love, practicing magical rites" and "the scientific tradition," among other freeing approaches from a deep therapeutic grab bag.
"I don't want my work to be reduced to my personality," she said in a recent interview. "I want it to be my self, which I think of as something much larger."
The most recent work to emerge from these inquiries—which goes on view on Saturday in Ms. Bove's first New York solo show at the David Zwirner gallery—seems to channel spirits from the pantheon of heavy-metal 20th-century sculptors, a he-man group (it is almost exclusively male) that includes John Chamberlain, Tony Smith, Alexander Liberman and Anthony Caro.