New York, Kimmerich, Carol Bove, 5 March–1 May 2010
Literature
C. Chaffee, The Middle Pillar: Carol Bove, New York: Karma, 2013 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
A luxuriant sea of purest peacock, Carol Bove’s Untitled almost overwhelms with its mesmeric power. Bove is known for her unusual assemblages of found objects: she has created sculpture in media as wide-ranging as aluminium, petrified wood, concrete, and the work of other artists. Her feather arrangements breathe forth a lavish materiality that echoes the sumptuous decorative arts of the baroque. In regular formation the feathers belie any fragility of organic origin, ranks of eyes cascading through a design recalling damask wallpaper: the surface is hypnotic, shimmering and uncannily seductive.
The peacock has a rich history of cultural significance. In Persia and Babylonia it was seen as a guardian of royals, and early Christian symbolism associates the bird with immortality. Its magnificent plumage is used in courtship, and has a correspondingly sensuous visual appeal: the angle at which the ocelli or eye-spots are displayed is key in the male peacock’s sexual success. Bove distils and unbodies this iridescent splendour to a panel of pure abstraction, but maintains a sense of dark drama that projects out towards the viewer.
Untitled is a succinct expression of Bove’s practice at large; it is the enthralling result of a masterly command of the auras of objects. In her hands anything from looped white steel tubing to chain-link curtain can become an elliptical icon of ritual and allure, occupying installation spaces with subtly resonant sculptural conversation. The inexorable attraction of the massed feathers occupies scintillating ground between painting and sculpture, refining delicate physicality in an opulent quintessence of beauty.