ART CITIES:Beverly Hills-Anthony Caro

Anthony Caro’s constant reinvention of the language of sculpture, as well as his influential teaching career at St. Martin’s School of Art of London, distinguished him as the successor both to Henry Moore and to David Smith, and as a tireless innovator who transformed sculpture through his lifelong investigation of how it is actually experienced.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

In the exhibition, “Works from the 1960s” are on view 14 early sculptures of Anthony Caro. Over the course of his 60-year career, Caro continuously reimagined the relationship viewer-sculpture. From his beginnings as an assistant to Henry Moore during the early 1950s, he worked to contort the figure to the brink of abstraction. Subsequent decisions to bypass representational imagery altogether, and to use bright colors to synthesize the bolted and welded metal parts that replaced it, marked a breakthrough in Caro’s quest to elicit a charged response that was as optical as it was corporeal. His rejection of the pedestal to place his works directly on the gallery floor, which resulted in a direct, one-to-one relationship between viewer and artwork, was perhaps his most radical and innovative revision of sculptural tradition. Following a pivotal trip to the U.S. in 1959, Caro began a new approach to form, color, and presentation. Inspired by David Smith’s transposing of impulsive painterly lines into welded and forged metal, he cultivated an original lyricism from industrial steel and aluminum parts. His exuberant sculptures of the period unfold within the personal space of the viewer, shifting dramatically in appearance as s/he walks around them, although they mark a departure from the figure as subject, a sense of liberation from the concentrated weight, scale, and ordered naturalism of the body endures. The works are characterized by tensions between elements that are upright and leaning, rigid and curved, rectilinear and inflected,

Info: “Works from the 1960s”, Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, Duration: 17/4-30//1, Days & Hours: Tue–Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com