Carol Bove’s Chimes at Midnight VIII, 2023, is a monumental sculpture installed at the entrance to the Hessel Museum, concurrent with Bove’s 2026 mid-career survey at the Guggenheim Museum. The sculpture is on long-term loan from a CCS Bard Board of Governors member.
Over almost three decades, Carol Bove has forged a unique artistic path exploring and expanding formal abstraction, doing so with deft skill and playful juxtapositions of form, color and material, a balancing act she often delivers in monumental form. The Chimes at Midnight series from the early 2020s combines salvaged and repurposed Corten steel elements with vibrant, powder-coated, red-orange crushed-shaped forms. The result — a tri-partite sculpture with a central, colored element nestled between two steel towers — is a forward-looking nod to her modernist (all male) counterparts: David Smith, Anthony Caro, Donald Judd and a not-so-subtle reference to Richard Serra, as if the orange centerpiece of Chimes at Midnight VIII is squeezed between, or perhaps squeezing out of, the rigors of late-twentieth-century Minimalist sculpture.
The title of the work derives from Orson Welles’ 1965 film Chimes at Midnight, in which the famous filmmaker/actor takes on the outsized, convivial rogue, Falstaff, of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV. In this Bove suggests she is both a happy journey(wo)man of modernist tropes and perhaps in defiance of its strict dictates.
Tom Eccles, Executive Director of CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art, states: “Chimes at Midnight VIII is an extraordinary and striking addition to CCS Bard’s public sculpture program and stands in concert with the work of Franz West, Cosima von Bonin, Martin Creed and Mark Handforth — all inventors of new sculptural languages and not without a surprising sense of playfulness and whimsy.”
Carol Bove, Chimes at Midnight VIII, 2023, will be on view through March 2029.
