### At the Guggenheim, Carol Bove Rewrites Minimalism Through the Body
A mid-century modern shelving unit, stocked with paperbacks from the late 1960s and early ’70s, is an unlikely point of entry into Carol Bove’s current presentation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Yet that modest structure clarifies the artist’s larger proposition: that the “support” systems of art — shelves, plinths, seating, armatures — are never neutral. In Bove’s hands, they become the work.
Installed along Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling ramp, the exhibition moves between intimate found-object arrangements, early drawings, and the monumental crushed-metal sculptures that helped define her international reputation in the 2010s. The through line is Bove’s sustained, pointed conversation with Minimalism — not as a style to be revived, but as a set of assumptions to be tested, softened, and, at times, quietly overturned.
Curator Brinson frames the bookshelf sculptures as a way for Bove to situate herself within a cultural and intellectual lineage, particularly in relation to “those women that [Bove] was communing with across time in the drawings.” The shelves function as both display and argument: domestic furniture recast as sculptural infrastructure, and reading material presented as a kind of portraiture.
That attention to context extends to Bove’s early drawings, including works such as “Sol LeWitt and Twiggy” (2004), described as among her most delicate and ethereal pieces. These drawings marked the first full body of her adult work, and they establish a sensibility that persists even when the materials later turn industrial: a preference for precision without bombast, and for atmosphere over confrontation.
Throughout the show, Bove retools familiar minimalist tropes. In “Composition with my Mother’s Spiritual Manual” (2002), she swaps out the cool authority of LeWitt-like cubes for the language of domestic design, replacing hard-edged geometry with the cultural charge of furniture and interiors. Elsewhere, she nods to the floor-bound severity associated with Carl Andre, but redirects it toward a more intimate register.
One of the exhibition’s most telling gestures is a “ghostly” tufted couch made from precisely hung beaded threads — a work first encountered at the Berkeley Art Museum that Bove later tracked down and acquired directly from the artist. At the Guggenheim, it hangs near the top of the ramp, and its presence is doubled by an identical couch Bove made for visitors to sit on farther down. The pairing is more than a visual rhyme. It is a curatorial intervention into how bodies move through museums — and into the modernist ideal of disembodied looking.
By placing seating and other site-specific furniture throughout the building, Bove pushes against exhibition models that treat the viewer as an invisible eye. The result is a choreography of pauses: moments that temper what critics have often characterized as Minimalism’s confrontational, even hostile, stance toward the spectator. Here, the museum’s architecture, its display conventions, and the textures of domestic life begin to blur.
Bove’s smaller found-object sculptures extend that poetic logic. Arrangements of seashells, feathers, driftwood, and metal read like compact, enigmatic stanzas. “The Oracle” (2010) presents seashells ornamented with spikes and curlicues on a metal armature; “Figure” (2009) fixes the ends of two peacock feathers to a tall metal rod so that two unblinking “eyes” meet passersby.
Brinson underscores the conceptual pivot at work: “The language of support and display, which [as a curator] you usually want to disappear and not distract from the object, becomes part of the sculpture itself. It’s a very simple act, but it’s weirdly radical in its simplicity.” In pieces such as “Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep” (2013), base and sculpture collapse into one: a concrete plinth inset with hollow brass cubes that can evoke, at once, a Brutalist architectural model and a LeWitt-like modular form.
About halfway down the ramp — and roughly halfway through the arc of Bove’s career — the exhibition shifts in scale and weight. In the mid-2010s, she began bending and crushing multi-ton sections of found and fabricated metal, producing works that defy expectations of mass and balance. Those crumpled beams and compressed planes became emblematic of her practice.
A key milestone came in 2013, when Bove mounted a commission on New York’s High Line: one of her signature collapsed beams, coated in bright yellow urethane paint, appearing almost casually draped over weathered steel. At the Guggenheim, that language of engineered force returns in an installation conceived for the museum’s High Gallery, where towering, industrial elements gather into a dense, immersive field.
Seen together, the exhibition makes a persuasive case that Bove’s project has never been simply to quote Minimalism. It is to re-occupy it — with books, furniture, shells, and the undeniable fact of the viewer’s body — until its old certainties start to feel newly contingent.
(Installation view: “Carol Bove” at the Guggenheim Museum, 2026. Photo by David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.)
