Anthony Caro  (British, 1924-2013) 

Anthony Caro (British, b.1924) is a sculptor best known for his Abstract constructions made of steel, bronze, lead, and wood. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1947 until 1952, while working as an assistant to the sculptor Henry Moore (British, 1998–1986). On a visit to the United States in 1959, Caro met the critic Clement Greenberg, Abstract Expressionist painter Kenneth Noland (America, 1924–2010) and sculptor David Smith (American, 1906–1965). Afterwards, Caro began welding steel into abstract forms and painting them in one primary color. In the late 1960s, Caro created a series of Table Pieces, which resist becoming models for larger works by incorporating tool parts that relate to the scale of the human hand. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Caro was concerned with how empty space and linearity could translate into sculpture. Emma Dipper (1977)—part of a series made of Emma Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada—resembles a steel line-drawing that seems to float in space, without a base and center. Caro avoided complete abstraction by maintaining a connection with the body; his work curves into organic forms, maintains life-size scale, and invites the viewer to walk around to understand the relationship between sculpture and space. His work in the mid-1980s embraced this literalness more fully in work such as Night Movements—a sculpture broken down into four separate parts that asks the viewer to connect these parts—resembling physical movement, into a whole sculpture. His first major show was at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1963. Since then, he has held retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1975), Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (1995), and the Tate Britain in London (2005).