Carol Bove
Nights of Cabiria
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
September 25 – November 1, 2025
Nights of Cabiria, 2025, installation view
© Carol Bove Studio LLC
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy Gagosian
Idiopathic Abstraction, 2020-25
Found steel, stainless steel and urethane paint
84 13/16 x 100 1/2 x 89 5/8 inches (215.4 x 255.2 x 227.6 cm)
© Carol Bove Studio LLC
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy Gagosian
Carol Bove
Nights of Cabiria, 2025, installation view
© Carol Bove Studio LLC
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy Gagosian
Gagosian presents Nights of Cabiria, an exhibition of new sculptures by Carol Bove. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery in Beverly Hills.
In Nights of Cabiria, Carol Bove reflects on the industrial heritage of Los Angeles as a Cold War–era center for precision aerospace and weapons manufacturing, along with subcultural expressions of that focus such as surfboard production, with its devotion to perfect surface finish. The exhibition design responds to the unique architectural features of the Beverly Hills gallery and makes use of reclaimed structural scaffolding components called “soldier beams.” This scaffolding, intended for applications in civil engineering, provides the components for an architectural folly that supports two of the sculptures and partially reconfigures the gallery space.
Also dividing the gallery’s interior are a fence-like suspended metal lattice and two fabric scrims. One of these, made from diaphanous chiffon, has been screenprinted with an image of the lattice at the same scale. The other is made from the silkier material known as charmeuse, and is printed with a still from Italian silent film Cabiria (1914). Directed by Giovanni Pastrone, shot in Turin, and set during the Second Punic War of 218 to 202 BCE, the classical epic is credited with various innovations including the first extensive use of a moving camera.
Similar Salamander, 2025
Nickel-plated steel structural scaffolding and stainless steel
76 3/4 x 44 1/4 x 38 3/4 inches (194.9 x 112.4 x 98.4 cm)
© Carol Bove Studio LLC
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy Gagosian
Carol Bove
Tied Light, 2025
Steel structural scaffolding, stainless steel and fluoropolymer coating
102 1/8 x 28 1/8 x 27 1/8 inches (259.4 x 71.4 x 68.9 cm)
© Carol Bove Studio LLC
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy Gagosian
Priestcraft, 2025
Steel structural scaffolding, stainless steel and urethane paint
100 3/4 x 24 1/2 x 20 1/4 inches (255.9 x 62.2 x 51.4 cm)
© Carol Bove Studio LLC
Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Courtesy Gagosian
Several of Bove’s new works also integrate scaffolding into their formal designs, some retaining the beams’ raw surfaces. Priestcraft (2025), for example, incorporates a crumpled steel tube that has been bent into a loop, painted a vibrant orange, and perched atop a stand made from the weathered girders. Other works combine square tubing with mirror-polished steel disks, recalling Hardware Romance (2021), Bove’s sculpture that was on view in 2023–24 at Gagosian’s Park & 75 gallery in New York, their varied surface treatments prompting viewers to question assumptions about the “inherent” qualities of the material world.
GAGOSIAN, BERVERLY HILLS
456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
