Carol Bove: Nights of Cabiria

Gagosian is pleased to announce Nights of Cabiria, an exhibition of new sculptures by Carol Bove, opening on September 25, 2025. This will be the artist’s first full exhibition at the Beverly Hills gallery and follows the installation of her sculpture Mary (2025) on the building’s roof in April. Embracing modernist formalism as a point of departure, Bove’s metal sculptures explore previously overlooked openings in the narrative of art history.

In Nights of Cabiria, 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 devoted to perfect surface finishes. The exhibition design responds to the unique architectural features of the Beverly Hills gallery and makes use of reclaimed structural scaffolding called “soldier beams.” This scaffolding, intended for applications in civil engineering, is used to construct a series of playful follies as well as pedestals and other framing devices for sculptures.

Several of Bove’s new works also incorporate scaffolding into their formal designs, some retaining the beams’ raw surfaces. Parallel Friction (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), the sculpture that was on view in 2023 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.