For the latest installation at REC, a tiny exhibition space barely visible behind a glass door in the building housing Esther Schipper’s gallery, Carol Bove has assembled The sky over Berlin March 2, 2006 at 19.00, a landscape of isolated objects adorning a bare, claustrophobic enclosure. A handful of meticulously placed everyday elements—Plexiglas cubes, wooden fragments, a peacock feather, small cement solids, a sponge—are spread on a wooden shelf that cuts the space horizontally at eye level. The sparse, fragile constellation of objects lies underneath a thick rain of narrow brass rods suspended from the ceiling. Taken together, these objects gracefully sketch the topography of a dreamlike cityscape. With great sensitivity toward her materials, Bove’s installation offers the spectator a twilight zone in which components merge elegantly, albeit seemingly accidentally. The installation recalls displays of decadent trinkets behind store windows. At the same time, Bove converses with Minimalism, adopting industrial materials and regular shapes that echo Donald Judd’s concrete cubes (or Hans Haacke’s and Larry Bell’s transparent versions). By combining these rational elements with natural substances rising proudly like pagan idols in this rigorously abstract, modern scene, Bove productively complicates this dialogue and reaches a balance at once delicately precise and strangely provisional.
