Randy Kennedy visits Carol Bove’s new show at David Zwirner and thinks he sees work that’s very familier … yet also new. Kennedy writes that she “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:
Laura Hoptman, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art who organized a show of Ms. Bove’s work in 2013, said she became interested in her art partly because of that risk. She considers Ms. Bove’s forays into big-footprint sculpture to be only superficially riffs on 20th-century forebears. “I had always thought of her as a neo-Modernist,” Ms. Hoptman said. “But I came to the realization that that wasn’t really it. I started to think that she was more a collector than an appropriator — a collector of talismans. Her pieces might be the children of those earlier sculptors, but they’re sprinkled with a different kind of fairy dust.” […]
“I don’t really believe in the stable self,” she said. “If there’s a John Chamberlain who wants to come through me, that’s fine.” Later, she emailed this thought: “Years ago, my grandmother made some diminishing remark to me about Busby Berkeley’s achievement, saying that he just copied all of his choreography from a kaleidoscope. But a lot of people have seen a kaleidoscope, and only one person made those dances! Everyone is thoroughly interconnected and everyone is also an individual.”
Sculpture’s Woman of Steel, Carol Bove (The New York Times)
