Carol Bove

Carol Bove is taking over Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Rotunda at the Guggenheim. The show is the largest presentation to date of the artist’s work and promises to be a conversation between sculpture and architecture, modernism and its afterlives on one side, and the viewer and their own shifting perspective on the other. This major exhibition, the artist’s first full museum survey, brings together 25 years of work within this spiralling space, which allows for a creative narrative without interruption, blessed with natural light from the overhead skylight.

Bove’s practice has long drawn from the visual grammar of 20th-century modernism. Early drawings reveal a quiet attentiveness to balance, gravity and orientation, concerns that soon found their way into sculpture. Her assemblages – made from books, steel, driftwood, feathers and found materials – feel at once deliberate and provisional, as though they could be reassembled at any moment. Much like the legendary modernist architect Alvar Aalto, Bove absorbed the architectural language and humanised it. Her art asks the viewer to slow down, to read space as carefully as form.

Left: Carol Bove, The Night Sky Over Berlin, 2006. Wax, concrete, driftwood, polyurethane foam, peacock feather, steel, bronze, wood, and acrylic. Collection of the artist and Gordon Terry. © Carol Bove Studio LLC. Photo: Maris Hutchinson.
Right: Carol Bove, The Moon and the Yew Tree, 2019. Stainless steel, urethane paint, and painted medium- density fibreboard forms. Private collection, Asia. © Carol Bove Studio LLC. Photo: Maris Hutchinson.

Within the Guggenheim, this sensitivity to context becomes central. Bove’s large-scale steel works arc, lean and curve in dialogue with the building itself, their surfaces catching light as the viewer ascends the Rotunda. In pieces such as Offenbach Barcarolle (2019) and The Moon and the Yew Tree (2019), the influence of minimalism is unmistakable, but in them, structural rigidity is softened by references that slip in sideways. Poetry, music and personal memory lend the work a warmth often denied to the movement’s harder edges.

Crucially, Bove treats the Guggenheim not as a backdrop but as a collaborator. Subtle interventions reshape how the exhibition is encountered, altering sightlines and pacing, heightening the awareness of one’s own body in motion. Looking becomes active rather than passive; perception, something that unfolds over time.

Seen as a whole, the exhibition positions Carol Bove as one of the most acute contemporary interpreters of the modernist movement, which is experiencing a significant revival. Her work resists fixed readings, favouring a state of openness instead. She invites viewers to engage, reflect and reconsider. It is a sensibility that feels entirely at home within the Guggenheim’s Rotunda and one that confirms Bove’s place as a quietly influential voice in contemporary sculpture.

Carol Bove
5th March – 2nd August 2026
Guggenheim New York
More information and tickets, HERE.

Author: Lina Ress

Lead image:
Left: Carol Bove, Rich Mom, 2018. Steel and urethane paint. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Lee Broughton. © Carol Bove Studio LLC.
Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio
Right: Offenbach Barcarolle, 2019. Found steel, stainless steel and urethane paint. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © Carol Bove Studio LLC. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Other art exhibitions in the UK and around the world recommended by I-M Inquisitive Minds include Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting (National Portrait Gallery, London); Pedagogies of War (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid); and Metamorphoses (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).