Anthony Caro

Born in 1924 in New Malden, England. Passed away 2013.

Anthony Caro is one of the most influential figures in the development of twentieth-century sculpture and its expanded fields. Born in New Malden, England in 1924, Caro studied engineering at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before training as a sculptor at the Royal Academy Schools, London. After graduating Caro produced early works on paper and in bronze interested in gestural, embodied and often humorous scenes of everyday life. From the 1960s, following a pivotal visit to North America, Caro began making brightly painted, abstract sculptures from scrap steel that he positioned directly on the floor, the omission of a pedestal marking a radical shift in the dynamic between work and viewer. In addition to steel, he also produced works in bronze, lead, silver, stoneware, Perspex and wood, as well as on paper. Throughout Caro’s seven-decade oeuvre, his sculptures in both abstract and figurative form explore the forces and resistances of the human body, as well as the feeling registers of human experience. As art historian Rosalind Krauss observed, “Caro rendered the human form not as it looked from the outside, but how it felt from the inside, with its relationships subjectively conditioned.” Caro’s constant reinvention of the language of abstract sculpture, as well as his influential teaching at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, has distinguished him as the successor to artists such as Henry Moore and David Smith. However, his works were also made and sit in dialogue with other global movements across sculpture, painting and architecture, formatively shaped by travel in South-East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, as he continued to reinvent his sculptural language.

Caro’s interest in architecture is exemplified in London’s Millennium Bridge (2000), which he designed in collaboration with Arup and Foster + Partners. In 2008 he completed the monumental Chapel of Light installation at the Église Saint Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg, France, materially setting in stone his role in the history of art.

Mid-career retrospectives of Caro’s work were held at the Hayward Gallery, London (1969), and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975). In 1992, the British Council organized an exhibition of his sculpture in the ancient setting of Trajan’s Market in Rome, followed by a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, in 1995. In celebration of Caro’s eightieth birthday, Tate Britain, London, staged a retrospective in 2005. In 2011, a selection of works dating from 1960 through 2010 were exhibited in the Roof Garden of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Caro’s 2013 retrospective at Museo Correr, Venice, coincided with the 55th Biennale di Venezia and was on view at the time of the artist’s death. In 2015 The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park held a joint retrospective to celebrate and commemorate Caro’s life and work. Knighted in 1987, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture by the Japan Art Association in 1992, and was inducted into the Order of Merit in 2000—the first sculptor to be so honoured since Henry Moore in 1963.