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Lot Essay
‘… each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy’ (Carol Bove)
Captivating and fanciful, Carol Bove’s Melty Legs (2018) seems to defy the most elemental of forces. Constructed from painted stainless steel, a material known for its high tensile strength, Melty Legs appears liquescent, each bright orange fold and contortion cascading gently towards the ground. Atop these pliable limbs rests a black disc, whose circular face lends the work an anthropomorphic quality. Bove, whose solo presentation opens this year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, is interested in how material can be manipulated and reimagined. ‘We think stainless steel is hard and strong’, she says, ‘and I’m wondering if this is really the case. Is there a gentle and persistent way to act on it so that it will behave differently?’ (C. Bove quoted in ‘Carol Bove: Hardware Romance’, Gagosian, November 2023, online).
Bove was born in Geneva but raised in Berkeley, California, a city whose blend of industrial sites and open green spaces would go on to inform her work. As a teenager, the artist was already grappling with questions of context that she debated while wandering the sculpture garden at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 1993, Bove moved to New York City to attend university and found herself drawn to Brooklyn’s aging waterfront. She understands her practice’s ongoing material concerns to be directly tied to this environment. Initially interested in assemblage, her recent work has embraced industrial fabrication. Bove’s fantastical steel forms are never preplanned but instead conceived with the help of a hydraulic press. Her aim is to respond to what the materials themselves are capable of generating. In this regard, she has cited the Abstract Expressionist sculptor Mark Di Suvero’s largely improvisatory process as a key inspiration.
In Melty Legs, as across her oeuvre, Bove has endeavoured to completely remove her persona from the final artform. At the forefront of each sculpture is the alchemical metamorphosis of steel, a tension she has continued to probe in works such as The séances aren’t helping, her commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which opened in 2021. Like Melty Legs, these sculptures are non-representational yet conjure playful figurative associations. By challenging expectations, Bove asks her viewers to reexamine their own relationships with and understanding of industrial materials. ‘I want things to be totally what they are,’ she says, ‘but for them to also trick or entice you, to hopefully bring more of your perception into the work and your interaction with the phenomenal world’ (C. Bove quoted in A. Reines, ‘Carol Bove’s Fifth Avenue Era’, Frieze, 7 January 2026, online).
Captivating and fanciful, Carol Bove’s Melty Legs (2018) seems to defy the most elemental of forces. Constructed from painted stainless steel, a material known for its high tensile strength, Melty Legs appears liquescent, each bright orange fold and contortion cascading gently towards the ground. Atop these pliable limbs rests a black disc, whose circular face lends the work an anthropomorphic quality. Bove, whose solo presentation opens this year at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, is interested in how material can be manipulated and reimagined. ‘We think stainless steel is hard and strong’, she says, ‘and I’m wondering if this is really the case. Is there a gentle and persistent way to act on it so that it will behave differently?’ (C. Bove quoted in ‘Carol Bove: Hardware Romance’, Gagosian, November 2023, online).
Bove was born in Geneva but raised in Berkeley, California, a city whose blend of industrial sites and open green spaces would go on to inform her work. As a teenager, the artist was already grappling with questions of context that she debated while wandering the sculpture garden at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 1993, Bove moved to New York City to attend university and found herself drawn to Brooklyn’s aging waterfront. She understands her practice’s ongoing material concerns to be directly tied to this environment. Initially interested in assemblage, her recent work has embraced industrial fabrication. Bove’s fantastical steel forms are never preplanned but instead conceived with the help of a hydraulic press. Her aim is to respond to what the materials themselves are capable of generating. In this regard, she has cited the Abstract Expressionist sculptor Mark Di Suvero’s largely improvisatory process as a key inspiration.
In Melty Legs, as across her oeuvre, Bove has endeavoured to completely remove her persona from the final artform. At the forefront of each sculpture is the alchemical metamorphosis of steel, a tension she has continued to probe in works such as The séances aren’t helping, her commission for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which opened in 2021. Like Melty Legs, these sculptures are non-representational yet conjure playful figurative associations. By challenging expectations, Bove asks her viewers to reexamine their own relationships with and understanding of industrial materials. ‘I want things to be totally what they are,’ she says, ‘but for them to also trick or entice you, to hopefully bring more of your perception into the work and your interaction with the phenomenal world’ (C. Bove quoted in A. Reines, ‘Carol Bove’s Fifth Avenue Era’, Frieze, 7 January 2026, online).