Anthony Caro, whose abstract steel sculptures are on view this month and next at C. Grimaldis Gallery, is one of the foremost British sculptors of his generation, an artist who has continually reinvented his approach to his materials and the plastic values they embody.
The Grimaldis show offers an overview of Caro's work mostly since the mid-1970s, when he began to diversify his approach and materials to include cast bronze, clay, brass, wood and stainless steel.
Caro has been creating sculpture since the 1940s, and by the early 1950s he had already made a radical break from the academic figurative tradition in which he had been trained as a student at Cambridge and the Royal Academy Schools.
In his search for a modernist style, he first turned to the great British abstract sculptor Henry Moore, whom he adopted as a mentor. "Henry gave English sculptors who followed him the confidence to feel they could be as good as the best, could take themselves seriously and be taken seriously," he later recalled.
Under Moore's tutelage, Caro learned to assimilate the avant-garde influence of Picasso, Miro and Brancusi, among others, and it was during this period that Caro also began to incorporate found objects into his work, a practice he would continue through his later career.
The earliest work in the Grimaldis show, titled Strait, dates from 1967. It exemplifies Caro's search for an abstract sculptural language that resulted, in part, from his encounters with American art critic Clement Greenberg and abstract-expressionist painter Kenneth Noland, both of whom he met in the late 1950s.
The work consists of two 5-foot-tall vertical members connected by whimsical (and rather frail-looking) horizontals that lie flat on the floor or curve upward from the verticals' base like three-dimensional line drawings. The entire piece is spray-painted a bright, fire-engine red.
By the early 1970s, Caro had grown dissatisfied with simple painted steel, which had become a widely accepted sculptural practice, and turned his attention to bronze, a material that, paradoxically, he had earlier rejected as being too traditional.
He also continued to work in steel, but rather than paint the material he now emphasized its natural patina by allowing it to rust and then varnishing the surfaces of his pieces.
Many of the works from this later period include bronze casts of found objects - a workman's glove, a pair of pliers, the tip and part of the handle of a crowbar - which Caro incorporated into the welded steel structure of his pieces.
