Carol Bove - "RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?" - NYTimes.com Jeffrey Sturges "Peel's Foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep" (2013), in brass and concrete, by Carol Bove at Maccarone. 630 Greenwich Street, at Morton Street, West Village The protean Carol Bove continues to cultivate her extraordinary garden, operating in the gaps between art and design, modernism (especially Minimalism) and nature, language and structure, found and made, order and chaos, her work/art and other people's work/art. One of the best artists of our peculiar moment, Ms. Bove started with appropriation sculptures consisting of shelves displaying worn, carefully chosen paperbacks on often arcane, metaphysical subjects. Here this opposition is manifest in a large sheet of glass suspended between I-beams and flanked by two columns of the gallery; it serves as an immense frame for a small Gordian knot of a painting, "Design for the Qor Corporation," by the polymath artist and kabbalist Harry Smith. It is also implicit in the inclusion of a vitrine of eccentric geometric drawings by and from the archive of Lionel Ziprin and Joanne Ziprin, who formed the mystically inclined, geometry-obsessed Qor Corporation, also a tile business, with Mr. Smith. The grid is a living, growing thing in Ms. Bove's universe. It is presented here as fragmentary and possibly mutating in a low-lying structure of small, perpendicular I-beams. It is definitely, elegantly mutating in "Peel's Foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep," two concrete blocks that form a seven-foot monolith, the upper one eaten away by a metastasizing grid of shiny brass. Her white tubular "glyph" sculptures, while all curves, imply infinite extension in their own way, while breathing new, gently irreverent life into generic public-art abstraction. The molecular, metabolic nature of the grid is signaled by the inclusion of a sculptural and mathematical feat from 1976 by Richard Berger: the top surface of his couch iterated in small lead pellets suspended from micro-filaments. It also seems implicit in the monumental piece of petrified tree trunk that Ms. Bove has attached (with only six bolts) to a tall I-beam, where it resembles a torso, a broken column and its former self. As if this weren't enough, Ms. Bove and Philip Smith, a rare-book dealer, have organized a dense exhibition about the Qor Corporation in Maccarone's project space at 98 Morton Street. It contains more drawings by Mr. Smith and the Ziprins and much more (studies and prototypes for tiles) in which geometry truly loses its mind and gains the universe. Meanwhile, the title of Ms. Bove's show says a lot: "RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?" It flags her work as Relational Aesthetics at its most profound and inclusive and flippantly posits the unity of natural and artificial form with a riddle from Batman's foe, the Riddler. Answer: They both have to be peeled (or pealed). This show is endless.