At the crossroads of sculpture and installation, Carol Bove works from a wide range of contrasted materials including L-beams, metal rods and tubular powder-coated steel, old-fashioned ephemeras and books, or scavenged organic objects and artefacts as seashells, feathers and driftwoods. Her diversified approach to sculpture, which tends to focus on physicality, materiality, spatiality, shape and weight, shows affinities with Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism and with the works of artists such as Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain and Mark di Suvero. A certain phase of her work can also be associated with Arte Povera. Mainly working, since 2016, in her huge hangar-studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the Swiss-born American artist developed a specific creative process consisting of improvising sculptures in the air rather than on the ground, using cranes and apparatuses for lifting hefty materials as she enjoys giving them a false appearance of lightness and fluidity.

With this installation, consisting in a large-scale canoe-like floating driftwood, suspended above the ground by two ropes, Bove explores the theme of “objet-trouvé”, the harvested ready-made randomly shaped over time by the forces and dynamics of nature. The dead trunk shows the direct and long-term modelling actions by the erosion effect of sun, wind, moon, tides and waves, that gave the wood this worn, soft patina and its unique, perfectly balanced biomorphic shape, which seems impregnated with some mysterious properties. It thus recalls Bove's interest in esoteric traditions related to cycles, dynamics and transmutations.

Carol Bove's installations frequently perform a fascinating fusion of industrially designed and formed materials with merely found, obsolete and discarded remains. Therefore, they offer a meditation on the convergence between art and nature, manufactured and happenstance, sophistication and simplicity, robustness and plasticity, but also between vulnerability and stubbornness.

KS