Anthony Caro

Though Anthony Caro's oeuvre is most readily identified by large-scale and plinthless sculptures that sometimes dwarf the viewer, he has directed a significant portion of his energies over the past five decades to the production of domestically sized pieces in a variety of media. This volume explores this underappreciated course of Caro's prolific output. The book is divided into sections that fall along the divisions of medium: Table sculptures (including `Writing Pieces'), Bronze Pieces, lead and Wood Sculptures, Paper Sculptures, Silver Pieces, Ceramic Sculptures and Jewellery. It provides an insight into Caro's working practice by considering the scale, the setting and the materials of Caro's small-scale sculpture. This volume offers an illuminating perspective on Caro's adventurous sense of the appropriate form and function of sculpture as he experimented simultaneously with their size, scale and medium This book surveys Caro's free-standing, floor-based, constructed, abstract sculptures from 1960 to the present. The unifying theme of these works is that they answer Caro's imperative `to make something that was as important in a room as a person'. The author explores the idea of presence in Caro's sculpture, focusing on the way that in order to invest sculpture with an independent existence and self-contained reality, it was necessary for Caro to purge it of figurative references. As a result, Caro has created sculptures that are `in the world' but not `of the world': they have their own individual character, but they exist at a remove, purely for the purpose of contemplation and employing a language of abstract, expressive shape. Paul Moorhouse's text surveys the development of this central and defining strand of Caro's work, following its successive phases with a focus on distinct themes, including; the idea of presence, the break with `pretence'; and figuration, expression without description, the connection with the human body, the relatioship with painting and music, the articulation of space, the connectedness of parts, the denial of mass and the illusion of weightlessness, the idea of place as presence, balance and extension, containment, the use of found material, and, more recently, the admission of semi-figural, allusive elements. The book outlines the scope and significance of Caro's achievement in liberating and extending the language of sculpture in the late 20th and early 21st century, and in establishing new realities for sculpture for generations to come Over the course of his extensive career, Anthony caro has undertaken several different trajectories in his sculpture. One consistent thread has been his remarkable ability to create evocative drawings in space. In this book mary Reid Discusses Caro's extended engagement with line in three dimensions, tracing characteristics of weightlessness, relationship to the ground, colour, movement, environment and even geographical location. In the late 1950s, Caro was becoming dissatisfied with his figurative sculture and was searching for ways to push his practice in new directions. Following the advice of the preeminent American critic Clement Greenberg, Caro set working in clay aside and began experimenting with common building materials such as steel girders and i-beams. The results revolutionised the very concept of sculpture. In turn these heavy initial experiments quickly moved to very linear, tensile embodiments of space and gesture. Over the course of the next 50 years this engagement with line has remained a constant within Caro's field of vision, continually shifting and morphing with each new surprising innovation in scale, surface, material, content and form. Mary Reid's text lays the foundations for a wider understanding of Caro's extraordinary sculptures. from which new interpretations can spring forth. The accompanying plates serve to highlight the development and multiple transitions of this important aspect of the sculptor's long and impressive career. Since the early 1980s, anthony Caro, first acclaimed for his linear, open steel constructions, has been preoccupied with a conception of sculpture as enclosed space and as metaphor for enclosed space. For the first time, Karen Wilkin examines the sculptor's fascination with questions about interior and exterior, volume and mass that verge on the architectural. Work emerging from Caro's studio over the last two decades has emphasised density and containment. Wilkin reveals the evolution of this approach from its seeds in his early figurative sculptures of the 1950s, through his internationally celebrated steel works of the 1960s, and 1970s, to his recent large-scale sculptures, These culminate in Caro's Chapel of Light, Bourbourg, Pas-de-Calais, where he was commissioned to bring a damaged 13th-century apse back to contemporary life. Caro treated the entire choir as a mixed-media sculptural volume, animated by his additions of wooden towers, reliefs and an enormous baptismal font. Karen Wilkin draws on her vast knowledge of Caro's work, based on 30 years of experiencing his sculptures directly, visiting the studio and holding conversations with the artist. She reaches out to new audiences for his work while at the same time offering new insights and interpretations to the specialist. Over the past two decades Anthony Caro has moved on from the steel sculptures with which he achieved international standing to explore the unknown ground where abstract, figurative and narrative art all meet. As this book reveals, this is not some reckless late style of an established artist determined to be provocative. Rather, these more recent works share many of the concerns of Caro's celebrated sculptures, In their human scale and physical range of reference, in their commitment to the power of expression and in their essential humanity, these sculptures provide a fresh perspective from which to recognise essential qualities of Caro's art as a whole. Published to mark his 85th birthday, this book reveals how Caro's figurative and narrative sculptures test the frontiers of abstraction