Anthony Caro - Professional Career

Professional Career

Anthony Caro found modernism when working as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 1950s. After being introduced to the American sculptor David Smith in the early 1960s, he abandoned his earlier figurative work and started constructing sculptures by welding or bolting together collections of prefabricated metal, such as I-beams, steel plates and meshes. Often the finished piece is then painted in a bold flat colour.

Caro found international success in the late 1950s and for a time was popular in the US. He was also influential as a tutor at St Martins School of Art, now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London inspiring a younger generation of abstract British Sculptors led by former students and assistants like Phillip King, Tim Scott, William G. Tucker, Peter Hide, and Richard Deacon; as well as a reaction group including Bruce McLean, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, David Hall and Gilbert and George. He and several former students were asked to join the seminal 1966 show at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, Primary Structures representing the British influence on the "New Art". Caro taught at Bennington College from 1963 to 1965, along with painter Jules Olitski and sculptor David Smith.

He is often credited with the significant innovation of removing the sculpture from its plinth, although Smith and Brâncuşi had both previously taken steps in the same direction. Caro's sculptures are usually self-supporting and sit directly on the floor. In doing so, they remove a barrier between the work and the viewer, who is invited to approach and interact with the sculpture from all sides.

In 1980, Caro was trying to organise an exhibition of British abstract art in South African townships when he met Robert Loder. In 1981, when staying in New York State, the pair developed the idea of running workshops for professional artists which became the Triangle Arts Trust. They held the first Triangle workshop in 1982 for thirty sculptors and painters from USA, the United Kingdom and Canada at Pine Plains, New York.

In the 1980s, Caro's work changed direction by introducing more literal elements with a series of figures drawn from classical Greece. Latterly he has also attempted large scale installation pieces. One of these large pieces, Sea Music, stands on the quay at Poole in Dorset. To mark his 80th birthday, a retrospective exhibition was organized by the Tate Gallery in 2005. He was knighted in 1987 and received the Order of Merit in May 2000.

Caro's work has been featured in many museums and galleries worldwide spanning the last fifty years. In 2004 to honor his 80th birthday, seven institutions including the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore and the Artemis Greenberg van Doren and Garth Clark Gallery in New York, Galerie Josine Bokhoven in Amsterdam, Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris and the Tate Britain held exhibitions of his work. The C. Grimaldis Gallery has had a strong relationship with the artist for more than three decades, producing four solo exhibitions in twenty five years. A fifth exhibition is scheduled for fall of 2012. Grimaldis in particular shows his small scale table pieces and works in bronze, which, as noted by John Dorsey in the Baltimore Sun, "is in a line of work that descends from the 1960s and that grew out of Caro's desire to create table pieces that would not be seen as merely smaller versions of large sculptures."

In 2008, Caro opened his "Chapel of Light" installation in the Saint Jean-Baptiste Church of Bourbourg (France), and exhibited four figurative head sculptures at the National Portrait Gallery, London. In 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art installed five works by Caro on their rooftop. Currently, at 87 years of age, Caro is working on an immense, multipart sculpture that will occupy three blocks of Midtown Park Avenue, to be installed in 2012.