Second Cartesian Sculpture

Carol Bove

b. 1971, New York City

Second Cartesian Sculpture, 2014

Steel and zinc-plated steel

For the 2012 Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, Bove installed a group of sculptures around a marble statue of the goddess Flora that presides over the city's Orangerie gardens. During the run of the project, the brass elements of several works were bent and broken by vandals. Rather than restoring the damaged pieces, the artist absorbed the fragments into her process, creating a new sculpture titled Flora's Garden II, on view here.

Stacked brass cubes are contained within a welded steel frame and positioned in relation to a concrete form and a plinth scattered with the small, twisted remnants of the original sculptures. Bove was struck by the affinity between these warped structures and Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes (1974), an influential work of Minimalist sculpture that explores the repetition and permutation of forms. Her skeletal brass prisms shift, overlap, and cast linear shadows, at times suggesting the presence of a whole that never fully resolves.