For Immediate Release
Carol Bove
The Middle Pillar

Exhibition: September 27 through October 27, 2007
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10-6 pm

Maccarone is pleased to announce its first solo show with New York based artist, Carol Bove.

Bove's artistic output to date has been widely accepted as part of an enlarging social project congruous with her investigation into the philosophies and aesthetics of the l960s and early 70s, forging meditative environments designed for listening, reading, and looking. Using the past as artist material, Bove's chief medium has taken on a myriad of new historical references for The Middle Pillar. Continuing to employ sculpture, sound and installation in an architecture that feels inherently labyrinth-like by design, Bove takes the notion of the gallery as concrete pedestal, or tableau, one step further, utilizing the entire cubic volume of the space as compositional format. Creating a Structurist composition showcasing discrete works of her own devise along with works by other artists, the exhibition becomes a setting arranged with objects both of our time, and not, in dialogue with one another throughout the space.

Departing from previous installations, these tableaux achieve a declaration of physical presence, not just conceptually but also serving as a gateway to engage one's eye via the body. This gesture fractures from Bove's literal restrictions of historical materials, looking into the broader emblems of the twentieth century yet still echoing the period that initially set her inquisition. Setting for A. Pomodoro, 2005, is the catalyst for these arrangements, serving as the exhibition's thematic core. The Arnaldo Pomodoro sphere, circa 1963, functions as a metaphor for this new work; the literal surface has been peeled away to reveal a skeleton of new forms.

The tableau has been broken down and dispersed throughout the gallery, gradually progressing by association of the individual objects on display within it. The bronze sphere is arranged alongside other sculptural elements - found driftwood, steel wire mesh, peacock feathers, rectangular brass plinths. Thematically, the concrete slab operates as a pavilion of display, highlighting Bove's environmental approach to her practice as well as the artist's astuteness in the exercise of placement. Colors, forms and materials are well-choreographed, orchestrating a human response of rhythm, chance and coincidence within the gallery architecture.

Each object calls to mind an array of various artists, movements and specific works of art; the list of allusions runs deep. One can further view the exhibition in its entirety in relation to Bove's previous practice specifically, as if the gallery structure is a bookshelf piece that has been magnified. Additional concrete slabs scattered throughout the space some installed upright, others on the ground or affixed to the gallery walls, each retain their own unique materiality. At first glance, they are basic, neutral surfaces; up close emerge imprints of the wood shells from which the objects were cast. The stains, shadows and faint silhouettes of grain achieve a quality of delicacy and femininity in an otherwise hard, concrete structure. The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9:00 pm, consisting of 475 bronze rods, acts as an awning in the gallery's entryway, suspended from the ceiling in an arrangement pertaining to a specific "horoscope" during the exhibition. Notions of the viewer's orientation and physical presence in relation to the object underline Bove's idea that arbitrariness is inescapable, but precision can be realized.

Sharing her exhibition with other artists attests to a particular humility within Bove's oeuvre. Bruce Conner's assemblage September 13, 1959, 1959 illustrates an unquestionably rigorous and legitimately avant-garde artist critical to Bove's practice. The side gallery showcases a group of paintings by Wilfred Lang (1915-1994), a Bay-Area artist whose work is almost entirely unknown today and collected by the artist's grandmother. This particuar exhibition footnote harkens back to Bove's past installations that double as highly personalized archives. This collaborative emphasis is further echoed in the sound recordings of Bay-Area book dealer, Philip Smith, available for the show's duration. Bove produced the record and the cover image, underscoring how artists of the past and viewers of today both participate and complete this body of work.

Bove's current experiment results in a familial narration of 20th century art history, favoring instinct over conventionality, responsive to periods of harmony and reverberations, and when the canon's door otherwise has closed.

Carol Bove was born in 1971 and raised in Berkeley, California. Recent solo exhibitions include the Kunstverein Hamburg and the Kunsthalle Zurich, as well as Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Texas. The artist lives and works in New York.

For further information on the work in this exhibition, some of which was originally commissioned by the Blanton Museum of Art, see Kelly Baum, "Carol Bove: Setting for A. Pomodoro" (Austion, TX:Blanton Museum of Art, 2006)