Carol Bove

In 2025, the Musée d'art et d'histoire de Genève (MAH) awarded its fifth Carte Blanche to Carol Bove (born 1971). Blurring boundaries between art and everyday objects, Bove's installations create a dynamic dialogue, encouraging visitors to rethink their relationship with art and museum spaces.

Accompanying the first museum survey of Carol Bove's multidisciplinary work, 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.
The publication is housed in a die-cut slipcase inspired by Bove's distinctive use of geometry and color. For the first edition, these cases feature paper ephemera elements the artist has personally selected and hand cut into diamond shapes, making each copy a unique object. Contained within are two books that offer complementary but autonomous perspectives on Bove's ever-evolving body of work. The first contextualizes her practice across seven generously illustrated scholarly essays, accompanied by an extensive selected exhibition history and bibliography. The second, an artist's book conceived by Bove, features immersive photographic details of her works printed at the precise scale of the objects they represent, interleaved with a series of recent paper collages. Together, the two volumes present the first comprehensive survey of Bove's career in the form of a book-object, realized in tandem with the most expansive presentation of the artist's work to date.
The work of Geneva-born American artist Carol Bove (born 1971) spans sculpture, drawing, collage, painting and installation. Bove has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2003); Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013–14); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021), among others.