Carol Bove Stages a Colorful, Monumental Survey at the Guggenheim
The celebrated sculptor tapped British paint manufacturer Farrow & Ball to create custom colors for the walls throughout the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building
Among early spring’s anchoring shows across New York, Carol Bove’s self-titled career survey at the Guggenheim is the talk of the town. The Swiss-born American artist’s exploration of a contemplative tactility from the last two decades has agreeably brushed off the chilling moodiness of a snow-covered winter, and color has claimed the center stage. The task to fill the big shoes of interpreting Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic rotunda with a solo outing has seen many of Bove’s peers experiment with spatiality, texture, and coloration. In the hands of the New York–based artist, it’s an all-encompassing experience that gloriously absorbs the visitors and ushers them into a rare journey of artistic growth.
Riveting sculptures of clashing materialities run parallel to intimate mixed-media experiments on the verge of vulnerability and strength. In a reserved chronology, the show starts with Bove’s most recent output created within the last few months and crescendos toward the highest rotunda with book installations and minimalist sculptures from the early 2000s. A disarming color palette is central in this year’s corrugated stainless steel, anodized aluminum, and urethane paint sculptures, as well as in a handful of geometric anodized aluminum paintings. From a dusky shade of orange to green’s blossoming tone, defined hues bleed into the industrial roughness innate to steel and aluminum.
Color, however, extends from Bove’s intricately bent steel plates and dresses the museum walls through a collaboration between the artist and British paint manufacturer Farrow & Ball. The gradient dialogue between the sculptures and their backgrounds holds a different punch in a venue like the Guggenheim, where the rounded spiral structure yields a particular dimensionality. The show’s curator, Katherine Brinson, notes to Galerie the impact of a chromatic dialogue between Bove’s sculptures and their surroundings. “This whole idea of a graduated paint is a conceptual underpinning of Carol’s work and helps the visitors orient their bodies through the ascension towards the skylight,” she says. “You have to look very carefully,” the curator warns about what she calls an “amazing ambiguity” about the artist’s attribution of an incredible density to her surfaces.
Bove personally invited the 80-year-old, globally beloved paint company to collaborate on colors that have eventually come to define the show’s mood. Just like an afterthought of a book or a film’s soundtrack, the walls washed in 40 shades, which Farrow & Ball crafted for the show, complete the overall aura. Although the Dorset-born manufacturer has in the past partnered with institutions such as Leslie Lohman Museum and Picasso Museum, its creative director, Charlotte Cosby, tells Galerie that creating 40 custom colors for an exhibition is a novel experience. “It became clear early on that we are both obsessed with details and aware of how taking a tiny thing in or leaving it out makes a big difference,” she says. Along the way, what had started as a set of 72 shades concocted for the walls was boiled down to 40, which indeed stemmed from six signature Farrow & Ball colors, including the silver-hued Manor House Gray and Railings with its thick metallic shade.
Brinson calls the paint masters a “dream collaborator” and cherishes their ability to “fill in the gaps” between Bove’s picks from their color chart with brand-new creations. For Cosby, the journey—which took around a year—was somewhat similar to approaching an interior design project. This, however, didn’t mean her team didn’t have to craft a new eye for light and form. “The works have many textures like rust and high gloss, so we leaned towards matte backgrounds to make the works shine and pop,” she says.
After decades of coloring people’s most intimate interiors, art is the company’s alternative route to connect with the public. “Museums and galleries allow us to be publicly viewed on a bigger level,” Cosby says, adding, “Colors suggest to us to take a pause as we move through the space and take in the art on a deeper level.”
“Carol Bove” is on view at the Guggenheim through August 2, 2026.