Carol Bove’s Guggenheim retrospective transcends time and space

Lionel Ziprin’s incredible rediscovery really began in a walk-in safe in Carol Bove’s Brooklyn studio. It was a large safe, and it was old—Bove originally had to use a car jack to pry open its metal door—and it was an unlikely home for Ziprin-related items. Ziprin was a doyen of the Lower East Side art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, and was all but forgotten in the decades that followed.

In the early 2010s, Bove acquired Ziprin’s poems and paintings through her daughter Zia, and she later began exhibiting them alongside her own sculptures. Suddenly, Ziprin became a topic of mainstream conversation in the New York art world: in 2014, lintel My colleague Andy Battaglia published a lengthy profile praising Kabbalah practitioner Ziprin’s “highly networked and extremely unique thinking.”

Generally speaking, Zipprin is not a common figure in New York museums: neither the Museum of Modern Art nor the Metropolitan Museum of Art own any of his works. But this week, a Ziprin painting officially makes its way to the walls of a New York museum in an exhibition about Bove, an artist whose practice included both creating his own sculptures and championing unparalleled works like Ziprin’s. As far as I know, Boff’s Rotunda retrospective at the Guggenheim, which will be on view through August 2, is only the second time in recent years that Ziprin’s work has graced the walls of a major New York museum, the other being the 2023 Harry Smith retrospective at the Whitney Museum that Boff helped conceive.

Bove’s exquisite exhibition, curated by Katherine Brinson, who collaborated with Charlotte Youkilis and Bellara Huang, includes paintings by Ziprin, small drawings by Agnes Martin, assemblages by Bruce Conner, and sculptures by Richard Berger. Also included in the exhibition list are Édouard Vuillard’s paintings of Parisian streets, which Bove moved from the permanent collection gallery to the ramp for temporary exhibitions, as well as ceramic murals by Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas, often trapped under false walls. The mural, unveiled to the public for the first time in 23 years, was excavated by Bove, who designed an aperture through which to view the mural.

The centerpiece of the Guggenheim show are about 100 of Boff’s works, most of them sculptures: colorful metal works that tower high above viewers’ heads, curling spirals of white-painted steel, assemblages of shells and trash, and bookshelves lined with tattered books. Bove doesn’t claim Vuillard & Co.’s work as her own—she’s not exactly an appropriation artist. (Curator Cathleen Chaffee calls these representations “quasi-artworks” in the catalogue, which is probably the closest anyone can come to calling such an unusual gesture.) But in showcasing the art of others in her own retrospective, Boff shows that her artistic journey was not one she traveled alone — others were traveling along with it.

Get her installation Pomodoro Technique Settings (2006), the name refers to the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, whose work Boff saw as a child at the Berkeley Art Museum. Elements scattered throughout the installation can stand on their own as individual sculptures: driftwood pieces raised by thin railings, peacock feathers arranged on bases, concrete blocks, bronze armatures. The objects are so aesthetically different that they appear to be by different artists. Sure enough, all of them were Bove’s creations, with one exception – a bronze sphere whose rusty surface cracked to reveal a row of gnashing teeth. The sphere was created by Pomodoro himself, who died last year Pomodoro Technique Settings Condolences for the passing of artistic predecessors.

In displaying Pomodoro’s sculptures alongside her own objects, Beauvais erased distinctions between the new and the old, the industrial and the artificial, the original and the unoriginal. The work also transcends traditional chronology: the Guggenheim Museum’s Pomodoro is from 1996, roughly a decade before Bove created the installation, although only those who read the label would notice this. After all, Boff’s practice is about creating relationships between diverse people and objects, transcending traditional concepts of time and space.

Her Guggenheim exhibition is also part of the project, with the oldest works placed at the top of the rotunda rather than at the bottom. For the sake of this review, I’ll start at the end, where one can find conceptual artwork rooted in Bove’s post-psychedelic Bay Area upbringing in the ’70s and ’80s.

She was born in Geneva and raised in Berkeley, California, dropping out of high school in the 11th grade. After ten years of what Brinson described as “odd jobs” in her catalogue, Bove settled in New York, where she earned degrees in photography and art history at the age of 29. Her late start seemed to finally provide an outlet for all her pent-up energy: She burst out of the gates in the early 2000s, painting bizarre paintings of Sixties icons like Twiggy, whose striking features appear almost translucent in Bove’s hands, as if the British model had disappeared before Bove could capture her with his pen. This 2004 painting dispels Twiggy’s usual celebrity worship art forumA cover appearance the following year established Boff’s reputation as an artist to watch.

Meanwhile, Bove also uses used bookshelves and old books to create assemblages that seem to be grouped not by subject but by mood. Under the memorable title Sensual dirty old man (2006), among a group of which Ralph Siu’s tome on the I Ching stands erected next to a concrete block, a catalog on Alberto Giacometti, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s librettos on art classics Last year in Marienbad. As far as I know, Robbe-Grillet’s plays and Giacometti’s sculptures have nothing in common with ancient Chinese divination. Bove seems to have placed these three texts together simply because they all contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. This shelf is like a universe of time.

The charm of these bookshelves lies in the wear and tear of their materials: the books used have clearly been read, re-read and turned over, meaning that they also serve as records of their previous owners. The trash installations she has made since have continued this theme; the Guggenheim show even included a soiled Dunkin’ Donuts napkin.

Then, around 2012, Bove’s practice took a radical turn. That year, at Documenta, she exhibited her first “symbol,” a sculpture consisting of a curved spiral snake made of white steel. They are spotless and unusually smooth, reminiscent of the minimalist sculptures that were popular in the sixties, like the works of many of the writers on her shelves. There is no doubt that Bove connected himself with a new group of writers through these works. But Boff’s “glyphs” are looped and soft, whereas most minimalist sculptures tend to be hard, heavy and solid.

Over the next decade or so, Boff would continue to dialogue with minimalism, managing to do so with equal parts admiration and loathing. 10 hoursThis 2019 work is emblematic of a still ongoing period of polychrome sculpture, its steel beams recalling those in the works of Richard Serra, arguably the quintessential user of this metal. But then Bove, in a gesture far removed from Serra’s machismo, weighted it with another beam, making it appear fragile and light. Then she painted the beam yellow and let it sag.

Her steel mills became increasingly extravagant. sweet charity (2026) is the star work of the Guggenheim exhibition, taking on the proportions of a forest, its steel beams rising high above the heads of the tallest viewers. The beams feature unnaturally smooth discs, whose soft appearance contrasts with the appearance of the broken steel, which appears lush and ethereal, like the curtains in Bernini’s sculptures. sweet charity Ornate, extravagant and formalistic – all qualities that give Boff’s recent work an edge in an art world still dominated by cold-eyed conceptualism.

More similar discs sweet charity Exhibits are spread across the Guggenheim’s ramp, all in the same location on each floor, one above the other. They form the backbone of the show and come from Bove’s 2021 installation for an exterior alcove at the Met, where they formed a group called Séance Without Help. (It must be said: She has a real knack for titles.) As the name suggests, trying to communicate with other planes can be difficult, but Boff’s discs pretty much get the job done. Glimpses of a disk in the rotunda may cause blurry reflections to appear to other visitors. You might mistake them for ghosts.