The Night Sky Over New York,October 21, 2007, 9 pm

Carol Bove

b. 1971, New York City

The Night Sky Over New York,October 21, 2007, 9 pm, 2007

Bronze and steel

FWA–Foundation for Woman Artists, Belgium

In 2006, Bove embarked on a series of works that map the configuration of stars directly above specific geographic locations at precise dates and times. The Night Sky Over New York, October 21, 2007, 9 pm features 475 slender bronze rods suspended to form a celestial chart of the sky above New York’s Maccarone gallery at a moment coinciding with her 2007 exhibition there. While giving physical form to a fleeting instant, this sculpture simultaneously invokes the vast sweep of astronomical time.

Taking a conceptual approach characteristic of her early works, Bove grounds this cosmic gesture in an existing artistic language. The Night Sky’s forms are drawn from a 1958 sculpture by Richard Lippold commissioned for the bar at the Four Seasons, an iconic Manhattan restaurant designed by the modernist architects Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Here, Bove merges her astral imagery with a formal vocabulary connected to cosmopolitan midcentury style.