ANTHONY CARO
Anthony Caro (born 1924) is a revolutionary sculptor who has made perhaps the most radical contribution to British sculpture since Henry Moore, whom he worked for as an assistant at the start of his career. Caro also taught at St. Martin’s in London and helped to develop the sculpture department there, which had a profound impact on the direction of British sculpture form the 1950s to the late 70s.
In his search for a new type of sculpture, Caro achieved freedom from manual dexterity and from the monolith, and banished visual references to nature or the human figure. Breaking away from Moore, Caro discovered a whole new sculptural language inspired by Cubism and twentieth-century abstract painting promoted by Clement Greenberg. He opened up the traditional volume, mass and weight of sculpture to create large, airy and gesticulatory forms that possess an entirely original identity and presence of their own. He wanted the sculpture to have a direct physical impact and inhabit the viewer’s space, which he achieved by removing it from the traditional plinth and placing it directly on the ground.
Caro also began to use colour in a fresh, vibrant and entirely non-associative way, as a skin to cover the steel and aluminium girders with which he chose to work. The availability of this new range of materials shaped the direction of his artistic project. Rejecting casting or carving methods, Caro chose the technique of welding, which allowed him to alter or improvise a sculpture during the making process, as well as incorporate found objects such as scrap metal or machinery parts.