‘The idea for this sculptural installation came to me last year when I visited the David Zwirner space in Paris for the first time and saw the glass and steel roof that brings natural light into the central room. In my view, this glass roof reflects the history of Paris and the history of all the city’s buildings constructed in the 19th century, whose gray steel and glass roofs truly shaped the architectural identity of the city. This gray color and these two materials quite naturally became the basis for the four sculptures I am currently showing in the central room, which I think of as an ensemble in this space.
‘The disk parts of the sculptures are approximately one and a half meters in diameter. They are all made of the same rather opaque glass, which is original when you think about the properties of the material. I worked with the team that produces the American sculptor Larry Bell’s glass pieces in order to achieve this look. When I visited their workshop and they showed me the material that I ended up using, I was immediately struck by its appearance. It was the most disturbing and interesting glass I had ever seen.
‘When I was considering how to stage my installation and to connect the sculptures to one another at David Zwirner, I promptly thought of the vase invented by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915 – an image where two identical faces looking at one another describe the contours of a vase, and which gives my exhibition ‘Vase/Face’ its title. I found that materializing the image in this rather tall structure I placed in the center of the room provided a solution to give sense to the ensemble. This very figurative construction is not a work in its own right, but instead a piece of set design, like the platform I set up behind it to present two of the four sculptures and to create multiple fields of vision for the viewer. As soon as the visitor enters the room, they see the two sculptures placed on the ground at the same time as the two placed on this pedestal. But the viewer can escape from this frozen image by going around the works, and even behind the platform, where a double staircase incorporated into the structure allows one to climb onto the platform and see the entire room from a completely different point of view. I really wanted to play with these differences in levels and perspectives.
‘There is also a lot of humor in my work, even if it is not always obvious at first glance. This humor operates through a certain physical comedy in the works, like the fact that these four sculptures remain upright thanks to glass circles surrounded by crushed steel tubes, which is a little ludicrous. I am always looking for that beguiling balance between elegance and awkwardness. There is undeniably a theatrical dimension to my work, which comes from my natural propensity to decode exhibition architecture. It is a rather subtle language that allows you to say something by simply placing a dividing line between the color of one wall and that of the next. The way I produce and present my work could be considered as a material and spatial reflection of this. Something very ontological leads us to ask: what can we understand about the nature of reality by analyzing only these material and physical clues?
Matthieu Jacquet is a journalist and art critic based in Paris. He writes about art and fashion for Numéro and Numéro art.
Carol Bove
‘Vase/Face’
David Zwirner, Paris
Until December 17, 2022
All photos: Installation views of Carol Bove’s exhibition ‘Vase/Face’ at David Zwirner, Paris, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
Video by Pushpin Films.
English translation: Jacob Bromberg