Anthony Caro British, 1924-2013

British abstract sculptor Anthony Caro’s (1924-2013) monumental artistic oeuvre is characterised by an unwavering and persistent innovation of form. Throughout his career, he was consistently concerned with the relationship between the viewer and artwork; a relationality that pushed him to produce works interrogating how the human body inhabits and moves through space via pieces of immense scale and delicacy. Though his sculptures vary drastically in size, material, and finish, they are unified by a gestural and conceptual charge typically articulated through a refined architectural, and at times corporeal, visual language. Dissatisfied with what he saw as the limitations of representational sculpture that he encountered in his early career, Caro was an insistent innovator. His output ranges dramatically from monochromatic, sprawling installations and vast activations of space to intricate, ‘table’-based assemblage pieces made from found materials.

Born in Surrey, England in 1924, Caro received a degree in engineering from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1944 before serving in the Royal Navy until the end of WWII. After the war, he went on to pursue a formal arts education, studying sculpture at the Regent Street Polytechnic from 1946-47 and then furthering his studies at the Royal Academy Schools between 1947 and 1952. Following his training, Caro went on to work as an assistant to famed British sculptor Henry Moore from 1951-53. This was a period of immense professional growth for Caro during which he was able to further his technical abilities, but which also left him feeling somewhat frustrated with Moore’s Modernist, distinctively anthropomorphic approach to sculpture-making.

At this point in his artistic development (the mid-1950s), Caro was mostly making representational bronze figures cast from clay in a similar style to Moore, yet with an overall more gestural and marked aesthetic. It was not until 1959, when a grant from the Ford Foundation allowed him to visit the United States, that his distinctive sculptural language would emerge. While in the US, Caro met many of his American contemporaries who were at that time pushing the limits of painterly and sculptural abstraction – including artists Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and David Smith, as well as the critic Clement Greenberg. These meetings precipitated a major breakthrough in Caro’s practice.

Upon returning to the UK, he began developing his signature style which uses pieces of (often discarded) large-scale industrial steel and aluminium, usually painted in vibrant block colours and arranged in delicate yet imposing choreographies. Prominent works from this period include Twenty Four Hours (1960), Early One Morning (1962) (both now in the Tate collection), and Midday (1960) (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY).

Caro maintained an unwavering innovative impulse throughout his career and very rarely continued along one line of thought or procedure for an extended period. His later works began incorporating additional materials beyond the metals of his seminal pieces – such as Perspex, wood, and clay. Caro’s conceptual intent with sculpture-making was, however, doggedly consistent and the overall bodily or corporeal formal language developed in his early career remained at the forefront of his approach throughout. The relationality between the interior and exterior of form (reflected in the dynamism between the human body and an artwork) is reckoned with across his artistic output.

His work is held in major collections across the world and has been the subject of numerous internationally notable museum and gallery shows. These include multiple presentations at the Venice Biennale (in 1958, 1966, 1999, and 2013) as well as retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1975 and Tate Britain, London in 2005.