Carol Bove’s sculpture turns the clean lines of Modernism on its head. Her formal syntax is an adept language of bends, dents, torques, kinks, crumples, creases, and other folds that animate the sculptural surface. The artist has called these works “collage sculptures” – a type of activity that navigates a productive tension between the industrially formed and the merely found, between the obsolete and the newly minted. The physical friction of her material is animated through a bold, candy-coloured palette of reds, yellows, pinks and greens placed in dynamic contrast to her rough untreated steel. The slick finish of her paint jars with the rough faded materiality of her found objects. In this mode, the surface colour promotes the illusion that her steel tubes are constructed from a soft, malleable substance. Bove’s deft twists, folds, and bends demand a kinaesthetic approach from the viewer: they force the body, eye, and mind to shift, move and circumnavigate the work. If these objects were to tell a story it would be an account of movement and pressure, force and softness.
