Though a polite, tweed-jacketed man of relatively light frame, Caro was a bruiser of a maker. He knocked sculptures off their pedestals and bolted, say, a gobbet of steel to whatever else came to hand with improvisatory glee, from first to last. He never knew what he was doing until he’d done it. That’s what he enjoyed most: the thrill of discovering what his hand and his eye had been up to. Architectural forms enabled him to see and develop his creative potential. Take “Horizon” (Park Avenue Series) of 2012, for example. The ways in which these plates and girders of steel have been clustered and bonded have a precarious and dangerous urban excitement about them. We feel the roar and the teem of the city, forever on the making and the unmaking, on our very pulses.
When a British government minister was recently asked about the future of the UK’s steel industry, she replied, “Nothing is ever a given.” But in the modern world, the need for steel is a given. There is no construction, no vehicle manufacturing, no defence or aviation, no machinery, no trains or bridges without steel. Steel is modernity. Sculptor Anthony Caro knew this well. That’s why his powerful steel works caused such a stir when they first appeared in the early 1960s. It was only when Caro had a solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961 that his work was given real space. There is still, 60 years on, something radical, strange and enigmatic about his heavy works and, in the show Anthony Caro: The Inspiration of Architecture, in the setting of architect Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor in west London, they simultaneously shine, intrigue and bear down on the building.
Looking for an awesome London exhibition this March? Here's our roundup of must-see shows in the capital. Here's a chance to see late masterful sculptor Anthoy Caro's painted metal works in a stunning and historic setting. The exhibition explores Caro's innovative use of materials and forms, as well as his contribution to the evolution of modern sculpture. It includes several large-scale installations, including ones that feature steps and doors, and it's a unique opportunity to experience the beauty and depth of Caro's sculptures and how they crossed over into architecture.
English artist Anthony Caro left an enormous legacy when he died in 2013 at age eighty-nine. He was celebrated for his sculpture in Britain by the late 1950s, and internatinoally beginning in the early '60s.
In the excellent exhibition “Anthony Caro: First Drawings Last Sculptures,” which occupies both Mitchell-Innes & Nash locations, the pieces do a little of everything while adding something new: thick slabs of tinted or clear Perspex (acrylic sheets). The sculptures in Chelsea are especially powerful in scale and size. But as you walk around them, viewing their structures from different sides, noting the collusions of metal and plastic, human perception seems scrupulously accounted for.
In the early years of his career, Anthony Caro worked on a series of twisting, enigmatic depictions of human and animal figures, works that owed much to the spatial interrogations of Picasso and the broader canon of 20th Century European abstraction. The works are impressive in their understanding of the gestural and conceptual operations of the era’s avant-garde, but for Caro’s career, served in part as a starting point for his own engagement with space, not only on paper or canvas, but in three dimensions.
Once a cartoonish vibe takes hold of the works, the weighty hunks of steel in them start seeming faintly comic as well. Some of Caro’s steel consists of repurposed found objects: a hopper used to cart sand; a chunk from some kind of gantry. Rather than being elevated from their humble origins thanks to Caro’s high art, these objects now seem to keep Caro’s art down-to-earth – almost like found anchors that keep his foofy acrylic from blowing away.
With an Anthony Caro show currently on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York, we turn back through the ARTnews archives. Because the show brings together very early and very late work from the British artist’s career, we have selected one old excerpt, by Lawrence Alloway, and one new sample, by William Feaver, who in 2014 wrote an essay following Caro’s death the year before.
This is the artist’s first exhibition in the US since his death in 2013 and his sixth with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, who has exclusively represented Caro in New York for 14 years. The exhibition features work spanning Caro’s 60-year career and highlights the artist’s fearless and constant innovation throughout his lifetime.
The exhibition brings together late British artist Sir Anthony Caro’s works spanning his sixty years career highlighting the artist’s fearless and constant innovation.
The sculptor passed away a year ago this month, just as his major show in Venice was coming to a close. He is remembered here by the photographer who was working with him, and in a new book about his life and art.
Art Historian, Michael Fried, and artist, Charles Ray, discuss the life and work of Anthony Caro.
Sculptor Anthony Caro delighted in instigating huge challenges for himself.
Earlier this year, Jon Isherwood sat down with longtime friend Sir Anthony Caro in his London studio. The idea was simple: Would it be interesting to generate a conversation between two sculptors whose work is very diferent, but who share many common influences? In some ways, their discussion was simply an extension of an ongoing dialogue that has lasted for more than three decades, ranging across many topics, from studio practice and artistic process to their shared connnection with Bennington College in Vermont.
No one in the 1960s produced livelier, more infectiously playful sculpture than the British artist Anthony Caro, five of whose works now grace the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rooftop garden. “Anthony Caro on the Roof” runs through Oct. 30 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
Although he is widely viewed as Britain’s greatest living sculptor, received a knighthood 20 years ago and has been the subject of countless museum retrospectives, Anthony Caro has yet to have an exhibition in New York’s Chelsea, the epicenter of today’s contemporary art scene. But this fall, he will finally have his Chelsea moment.