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Carol Bove +3, 2001
American
Born 1971

Carol Bove

Born in 1971, modern conceptual artist Carol Bove was born in Geneva, Switzerland. The daughter of American parents, Carol Bove was raised in Berkeley, California, but she later moved to New York City in the 1990s.

 

It was in New York City that Carol Bove graduated from New York University, finishing her studies in 2000. During her decades in the art world, Carol Bove has developed a strong reputation among critics, galleries and collectors worldwide, and her work has continued to influence new generations of artists.

 

During her career, Carol Bove also served as an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Yale University Art Gallery. It was also Yale where Carol pursued her research into the history of architecture, focusing particularly on how changing tastes have impacted the evolution of the art world.

 

Throughout her career, Carol Bove has utilized a wide variety of materials in creating her art. Some of these materials are found items - things like books, bits of metal, and pieces of concrete and even pieces of foam. Others are natural materials she finds in the environment - things like driftwood, peacock feathers and seashells. In Bove's capable hands, these far-ranging and eclectic materials come together to create works of immense power and beauty.

 

Carol Bove works in a variety of media, most notably drawings and installations of various sizes. No matter what the media, Carol Bove explores many of the same themes in her work. Those commonly used themes include the social and political justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the related artistic movements of the time.

 

Carol Bove has used some very evocative forms to create her finished works, including ink drawings of naked women originally taken from Playboy magazines dating from the 1960s and 1970s. Carol has also used iconic model Twiggy for inspiration, drawing from images in Newsweek magazine and other sources.

 

Carol Bove has also created powerful sculptures, including large scale pieces made from bookshelves and featuring books from the 1960s and 1970s. These powerful sculptures are both literary and artistic, and they are designed to create strong reactions in the viewer.

 

This contemporary artists is known for the way she works, and for the fact that she often uses the works of fellow artists in her exhibitions. During a 2007 exhibition at Maccarone, Carol Bove utilized the works of fellow artists Bruce Conner, as well as Phillip Smith, a noted Berkeley area book dealer.

 

Carol Bove also drew on the work of fellow artists for a large scale multi-part installation. Most notably, that multi-part installation utilized the work of Arnaldo Pomodoro, a noted Italian Modernist.

 

During her long career, Carol Bove has been closely associated with a number of galleries, but she is perhaps best known for her association with a studio in Red Hook. After having worked out of the Red Hook facility for some time, Carol Bove later moved to a space along the Brooklyn waterfront, a converted brick factory that became home to many of her most notable pieces.

 

Carol Bove first began exhibiting her artwork in the late 1990s, and during that time, she has staged a number of notable solo exhibits. She has hosted solo exhibitions at some of the most prestigious venues around the world, including the famous Palais de Tokyo, the Horticultural Society of New York, the Kunsthalle in Zurich, Switzerland and the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany.

 

During her time in the world of contemporary art, Carol Bove has also received a number of important honors. One of the most recent of those honors took place in 2016, when it was announced that Carol Bove would represent her homeland of Switzerland for the 2017 Venice Biennale.

 

From her earliest days at home in Berkeley, California, Carol Bove had always shown a strong interest in, and an even stronger aptitude for, art in all its forms. From those early experiments with painting and drawing to her large scale artistic installations and sculptures, Carol Bove has continued to create new forms of self-expression, much do the delight of critics, gallery owners and collectors everywhere.

 

Even after all these years of success, Carol Bove continues to move forward with new installations and new works of art. She is currently looking forward to representing Switzerland in the upcoming Venice Biennale, and in the meantime, she is keeping busy with painting, sculpture and other forms of unique artistic expression.

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