ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Carol Bove
Known for works that incorporate found and constructed elements with a unique formal, technical, and conceptual inventiveness, Carol Bove stands as one of the foremost contemporary artists working today; her work has consistently challenged and expanded the possibilities of formal abstraction. She is equally interested in popular literature and the most popular Avant-Garde magazines of this period, as well as its architecture, music, art, and design.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Spanning two floors, Carol Bove’s solo exhibition “Ten Hours” in David Zwirner Gallery Hong Kong is her first in Asia. Known for works that incorporate found and constructed elements with a unique formal, technical, and conceptual inventiveness, Carol Bove stands as one of the foremost contemporary artists working today; her work has consistently challenged and expanded the possibilities of formal abstraction. For this exhibition, Bove expands upon her ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” compositions of various types of steel, begun in 2016. These works are characterized by square steel tubing that has been crushed and manipulated, painted in vibrant color, and variously combined with found pieces of scrap metal and, often, a smooth, highly polished steel disk. Playing with surface texture and pushing the limits of steel’s physicality, the artist’s new work continues her exploration of form and process, including folding and crushing steel into more complex compositions and rendering the material with an almost fabric- or clay-like, supple finish. Bove applies similar manipulations in her use of color to engage perception, experimenting with its illusory effects and possibilities. In addition, the artist’s evocative palette holds astrological, cosmological, and art-historical references. For example, a saturated, vibrant orange-red in the French Symbolist Odilon Redon’s painting “Flowers in Green Vase with Handles” (1905) is one point of reference for the coloring of Bove’s “VY Canis Majoris” (2019), named after a luminous, red hypergiant star in the Milky Way. In the installation, Bove directs viewers to reconsider space and their relationship to the works on view. Each floor is a distinct perceptual environment, creating an interplay between two formal modes of display. Bove uses an open layout with natural light in the fifth-floor space, which includes varied, vibrantly colorful works on pedestals of different heights, creating shifting visual relationships among them. The 6th floor acts as a more controlled environment and features two discrete spaces. In one room, a large-scale sculpture, “Offenbach Barcarolle” (2019), the title of which refers to a popular melody from Jacques Offenbach’s final opera, “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1851), is presented. The other space is characterized by large, geometric forms which evoke the Platonic solids (the three-dimensional, symmetrical forms that figure in ancient Greek mathematics and philosophy through 16th Century astronomy and beyond). In Bove’s installation, these forms function as pedestals that support and surround “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (2019), a horizontally oriented work painted in subtly gradated, saturated yellows and whose title is borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s eponymous poem of 1961. In her evocation of the Platonic solids, Bove references the work of British sculptor Helen Chadwick; the appropriated forms are painted with a uniform flat gray paint, and the same gray is applied to every surface of the sixth-floor gallery, aside from the sculptures themselves.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central Hong Kong, Duration: 1/11-14/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com
