PRESENTATION: Carol Bove-Nights of Cabiria
Carol Bove’s artistic project, developed consistently since the early 2000s, is fundamentally concerned with the contextual nature of meaning. Her work demonstrates how an artwork’s significance is shaped by its environment, from the intimate space of the studio to the public realm of architectural sites. Bove’s material intelligence is key: she moves seamlessly from curated found objects to fabricated industrial components, with her recent large-scale sculptures amplifying the poetic potential of rigid materials. By adopting and subtly subverting the strategies of modernist formalism, she performs a critical archaeology of art history, identifying and exploiting overlooked apertures to propose alternative, more expansive narratives.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
In her solo exhibition “Nights of Cabiria”, Carol Bove reflects on the industrial heritage of Los Angeles as a Cold War–era center for precision aerospace and weapons manufacturing, along with subcultural expressions of that focus such as surfboard production, with its devotion to perfect surface finish. The exhibition design responds to the unique architectural features of the Beverly Hills gallery and makes use of reclaimed structural scaffolding components called “soldier beams.” This scaffolding, intended for applications in civil engineering, provides the components for an architectural folly that supports two of the sculptures and partially reconfigures the gallery space. Also dividing the gallery’s interior are a fence-like suspended metal lattice and two fabric scrims. One of these, made from diaphanous chiffon, has been screenprinted with an image of the lattice at the same scale. The other is made from the silkier material known as charmeuse, and is printed with a still from Italian silent film “Cabiria”( 1914). Directed by Giovanni Pastrone, shot in Turin, and set during the Second Punic War of 218 to 202 BCE, the classical epic is credited with various innovations including the first extensive use of a moving camera. Several of Bove’s new works also integrate scaffolding into their formal designs, some retaining the beams’ raw surfaces. “Priestcraft” (2025), for example, incorporates a crumpled steel tube that has been bent into a loop, painted a vibrant orange, and perched atop a stand made from the weathered girders. Other works combine square tubing with mirror-polished steel disks, recalling “Hardware Romance” (2021), Bove’s sculpture that was on view in 2023–24, their varied surface treatments prompting viewers to question assumptions about the “inherent” qualities of the material world.
Photo: Carol Bove, Idiopathic Abstraction, 2020-25, Found steel, stainless steel and urethane paint, 84 13/16 x 100 1/2 x 89 5/8 inches (215.4 x 255.2 x 227.6 cm), © Carol Bove Studio LLC, Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 26/9-1/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
