Accompanying the first museum survey of Carol Bove’s multidisciplinary work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this two-volume catalog traces pivotal shifts across the artist’s 25-year career, ranging from her fugitive early drawings to her compositions of scrap metal and manipulated steel tubing known as “collage sculptures.” Bove’s inventive work spans many mediums and formal approaches but is unified by an exacting play of material, scale, color and space. She places these elements in dialogue with cultural histories to create the conditions for a resonant perceptual encounter.

Edited by Katherine Brinson, the curator of the exhibition, the two-volume catalogue featuring 130 color images is housed in a die-cut slipcase, which includes a unique, diamond-shaped paper element selected and hand-cut by Bove for the first-edition printing. The first volume contains illustrated essays by Kelly Baum, Brinson, Cathleen Chaffee, Jennifer Y. Chuong, Huang, Suzanne Hudson, and Mariët Westermann on aspects of Bove’s work, including the significance of shelves in her early assemblages, the peculiarities of surface in her recent sculpture, and her gardener-like approach to the use of contextual space. The second volume, an artist’s book conceived by Bove, reproduces actual-size details of artworks and a series of recent paper collages, which explore, in the artist’s words, “scale; color; arguably, surface; and, to a limited extent, shape.” [publisher's note]