Heavy Duty

In the male-dominated world of outsize, abstract sculpture, Carol Bove is an outlier. Just before the largest-ever presentation of her work, Grace Edquist visits her studio.

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On a gray November day, Carol Bove, whose improbable works of steel upend all expectations of how the material should behave, is in the second floor office of her Brooklyn studio showing me a small-scale model of the Guggenheim Museum, where she will have a retrospective this spring.

“So that’s the High Gallery,” she says. Placed inside are tiny 3D-printed versions of seven new sculptures she’s making for the show. Even at a 1:12 scale, they have an air of both delicacy and heft—contradictions that have become a Bove signature. She pivots to look out a window at the shop floor below. “And those,” she says, breaking into a grin, “are the works.” A team of studio assistants pulls the plastic sheeting off two 14-foot-tall assemblages of raw and painted steel.

Bove has worked in this Red Hook studio for a decade, but she’s lived in the neighborhood since 2000—eight years after she first arrived in New York from California, where she grew up. The waterfront enclave is also where she’s raised her two children—a daughter, now 19 and attending McGill University, and a son, a sophomore in high school.

On the cavernous shop floor we scoot past forklifts and cranes to arrive at the base of one of the freshly unveiled sculptures, made from a slab of rusty steel rescued from a scrapyard in New Jersey and a crumpled rectangular steel tube painted blush pink. “The collaging of those elements really expresses the depth of the material,” Bove (pronounced bo-vay), 54, tells me. “They feel like they're from completely different worlds.” Such a contrast can be unmooring—by design.

Using not just steel but a wide array of materials, including driftwood, peacock feathers, and stone, Bove has long put perception at the heart of her artistic practice: What do we notice, and what do we overlook?