Carol Bove valuation
Sculptor of crushed and polished steel, folded into forms that look as light as paper.
Carol Bove was born in Geneva in 1971 to American parents, grew up in Berkeley, California, and graduated from New York University in 2000.
What a work by Carol Bove is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Carol Bove was born in Geneva in 1971 to American parents, grew up in Berkeley, California, and graduated from New York University in 2000. Her early work arranged things on shelves and plinths — books and magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, driftwood, peacock feathers, shells — alongside ink drawings of nudes taken from old magazines, so that the arrangement itself was the work. From the 2010s the scale grew: steel, concrete and found objects, and then the series she calls collage sculptures, in which heavy steel tubing is crushed and folded and set against polished discs and flat planes, painted in soft colour, so that something weighing tons looks as if it were made of paper. She was in documenta 13 in 2012, represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and filled the façade niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021, and in 2026 the Guggenheim in New York gave her first museum survey the whole of its rotunda.
The steel sculptures are unique and very heavy, and moving one needs a specialist; the painted surfaces scratch, and the parts of a sculpture and their exact arrangement should be documented. Smaller works, early shelf pieces and drawings come up as well, and the components of an assemblage should be complete. Provenance through Maccarone, David Zwirner or Gagosian, her galleries in turn, and the studio's documentation settle most questions.
Berkeley, the High Line and the Met façade
Caterpillar, seven large sculptures installed on the High Line in New York, opened in 2013, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas gave her Collage Sculptures, her first museum exhibition devoted to the steel works alone, in 2021.
The Met commission, The séances aren't helping, placed four of her sculptures in the niches of the museum's Fifth Avenue façade. The Guggenheim survey, which ran from March to August 2026, added a new group of collage sculptures made for Frank Lloyd Wright's building.
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