All Photos By Gail

These seven totemic forms entitled Sweet Charity (2026) represent the culmination of Carol Bove’s “collage sculptures,“ a body of work that has occupied a central place in her practice for the past decade. Conceived for this double-height gallery, the soaring sculptures entwine steel construction tubing with elongated shards of industrial steel plate.

Bove has manipulated the tubes into undulating volumes and precisely coated their surfaces and layers of richly hued, paint, lending the metal an unexpected sense of softness and plasticity. Large aluminum discs intersect the structures, hovering like celestial bodies amid a grove of vertical forms.

Installation Photographed from the Ramp of the Rotunda

Despite their immense weight and intractable materials, the sculptures are imbued with an exuberant sense of movement, as if they were dancing in space.

Bove’s installation expands on a group of her vertical collage sculptures from 2017 that invoke the Pleiades of Greek mythology –- seven sisters, often depicted reveling together, who were transformed into a constellation of stars to escape Orion‘s pursuit. A less exalted glamour is suggested by the title, a reference to Bob Fosse’s 1969 film, Sweet Charity, which tells the story of a lovelorn New York City dance-hall hostess through bold imagery and stylized choreography.

Photographed as Part of the Carole Bove Retrospective Exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.