New York
Carol Bove’s survey exhibition (on view through August 2, 2026) encompasses over 25 years of artistic production, mapping her formal evolution from early bookshelf assemblages and delicate paper collages through recent monumental, polychromatic steel sculptures. This “generative dialogue,” as curator Katherine Brinson characterizes it, seeks to contextualize Bove’s disparate periods within a singular, cohesive narrative, with the throughline grounded in the language of Minimalism, though Bove has continuously drawn from a deep well of art historical references. Those influences are highlighted through a physical dialogue between generations, with works from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection—including pieces by Agnes Martin, Édouard Vuillard, Lionel Ziprin, Bruce Conner, and Arnaldo Pomodoro—displayed alongside Bove’s own work. With this gesture, Bove, who was closely involved in the exhibition, acknowledges that “artistic practice does not exist in a vacuum, but remains in a state of continual, evolving conversation with the past.”
Beyond the works themselves (100 selections, including 27 large-scale sculptures), chosen to show a virtuoso mastery of material and form, Bove addresses her concern that museums are often “full of microaggressions,” treating the guest as merely “a body that carries around a mind.” To counter this, she designed the exhibition, which fills the Guggenheim’s spiral rotunda, with a focus on hospitality, installing custom lounges with plush wool cushions and a tactile library, positioned in the middle of the show, that invites visitors to handle studio materials such as cut steel and peacock feathers. While these are undeniably welcome gestures, providing respite along the more than quarter-mile ascent up the museum’s ramps, they create a striking paradox. Bove successfully fosters an environment of rest and play that transforms the Guggenheim into a more human place, but this very hospitality contributes to a general sense of overload. By the time visitors have navigated the lounges, the tactile library, and the numerous sculptures thrust against the ramp walls, exhaustion threatens, and the conceptual impact of some of the strongest individual works is diluted.
Departing from traditional survey organization, Bove and the exhibition curators have adopted a reverse-chronological layout, with the most recent work on the ground floor and drawings and installations from the early 2000s at the top. The highlight of the journey is Sweet Charity (2026), a new installation conceived for the High Gallery, featuring a forest of 20-foot crumpled steel beams. Here, Bove enters into a dialogue with Anthony Caro, Richard Serra, and John Chamberlain while subverting their “masculine” aesthetic by coating her dramatic forms in vibrant shades of pink, chartreuse, and orange. Designed to be felt as much as seen, the towering steel elements force a physical confrontation through their presence, prompting viewers to reconsider their bodies and movements.
While Sweet Charity commands space, many other works appear to be overwhelmed by the sprawling layout. For instance, the white powder-coated steel loops (or “headless snakes,” as Bove calls them) intended to connect her early found-object works and later monuments are relegated to the narrower ramp sections, where they fail to leave a lasting impression. Even the striking glass and stainless steel Vase Face I / The Ascent to Heaven on a Dentist’s Chair (2022), installed at the rotunda’s base, eventually dissolves into the larger flow. Less a curated journey and more like a collection in search of a stricter edit, this survey forgets that “less” is often the very thing that heightens appreciation of an artist’s achievement.
York
Several works transcend the density, however, chief among them The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 pm (2007). Suspended at the top of the rotunda, its 475 delicate, strikingly minimal metal rods catch the skylight’s glow as they sway gently in the wake of passing visitors. The work serves as a brilliant reinforcement of Bove’s commitment to spatial activation: from one vantage point, the rods dissolve into a shimmering golden haze; from another, they sharpen into precise, distinct lines, making the viewer’s ascent an essential part of the sculpture’s evolution.
In Field Figures (2008), Bove transforms decaying wood into a stark, monumental structure of paired Modernist forms. Massive driftwood logs set upright on a minimal steel base create a verticality that feels both organic and architectural. This work serves as a pivotal bridge, linking her early assemblages to her later, large-scale industrial steel sculptures.
10 Hours (2019), a massive steel sculpture, serves as a signature example from Bove’s “collage” series. The composition centers on a striking play of contrasts: a bent tube coated in vibrant banana-yellow urethane drapes over a weathered steel stanchion covered in a rusty patina. By merging industrial debris with fluid, painterly finishes, the piece challenges our perceptions of weight and materiality.
Ultimately, the question remains whether Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic architecture is the appropriate stage for Bove’s work. While she successfully treats the building as a “sculpture in its own right”—using a column of reflective aluminum disks that rises through the rotunda to activate its geometries—the installation often falters, while the impact of the exhibition is reduced, rather than strengthened, by its size. Even the decision to reveal the museum’s hidden ceramic mural by Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas—a fascinating historical nod—results in more visual clutter. Despite these tensions, the survey confirms Bove as a continually inventive artist, masterfully manipulating difficult materials into riveting forms.
