‘I wanted to give my sculpture the sort of immediacy you get when you’re talking to another person.’
A. Caro in conversation with K. Wilkin, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009, p. 19
‘I stopped using colour because at the time it felt too comfortable. Colour is just so emotive and you respond to it quickly and readily. Also, I wanted to make sculptures with looser steel parts and if you colour those you get too decorative. Sometimes I use colour now: certain sculptures need it.’
A. Caro in conversation with K. Wilkin, ‘Openings’, in Caro, Munich: Prestel, 1991, p. 11
‘Frequently, Caro’s pieces include sections like the literal openings we encounter in everyday experience – doors, windows, entrances – that allow us, in reality, to pass from one space to another and, in his work, to formalise the visual passage from one part of the sculpture to another.’
A. Caro in conversation with K. Wilkin, ‘Openings’, in Caro, Munich: Prestel, 1991, p. 10
‘The Steps series are Caro at his most architectural; arguably, though, it is only when they are seen in the landscape that [the sculptures] can most convincingly be regarded as sculptures. Whilst the viewer can enter inside their cathedral-like interior, it is really only by stepping back that it is possible to experience them fully and as objects.
[…] It seems entirely appropriate for a sculptor like Caro, who has been preoccupied with the conception and representation of sculptural space, to show his work where there is enough space, beyond the confines of the gallery and unrestricted by walls, so that the viewer is able to experience it up close and from afar.’
S. Feeke, Sea Music: Anthony Caro, London: Ridinghouse, 2017, p. 56
‘Caro created works that convey, as Michael Fried put it, “the efficacy of gesture: like certain music and poetry, they are possessed by the knowledge of the human body and how, in innumerable ways and moods, it makes meaning.”’
G. Tinterow, ‘In the Presence of Beauty’, in Caro at Museo Correr, exh. cat., London: Gagosian Gallery, 2013, p. 13
‘Caro’s large Emma cages are not at all architectural, but neither are they anthropomorphic, except in a tremendously abstract sense. Emma Dipper, with its central convergences touching and locating the floor unexpectedly, and Emma Dance, which inclines to the side as if about to erupt into a rustic dance, are beautiful and entirely original.’
T. Fenton, ‘Drawing Around’, in Anthony Caro, London: Academy Editions, 1986, p. 21
‘Works of these series such as Veduggio Sound and Veduggio Sun, both 1972–3, are so greedy in their claims for space that they can be read as ceremonial gateways through which we can peer but not enter; the massive, suavely shaped plates of steel that pivot between the uprights seem to have only momentarily swung open and could close again at any moment. We measure these schematic entrances against our own bodies and imagine passing beneath them.’
K. Wilkin, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior, Surrey: Lund Humphries, 2009, p. 17
'I wanted to jump in at the deep end. That is why the early pieces look as they do. I wanted them to be very clear, very simple, and they were.'
A. Caro, ‘Caro’s notes, dated 2000, for his exhibition at La Pedrera, Barcelona, 2002’, quoted in Anthony Caro, London: Phaidon, 2014, p. 134
‘Early One Morning is the quintessential masterpiece of this period. An enormous, yet intimate work, it is too delicate for sitting outdoors, and can only be accommodated by a very large room. It is also the first – and one of the most successful – architectural-scale pieces Caro produced during the 1960s.’
T. Fenton, Anthony Caro, London: Academy Editions, 1986, p. 12
‘Caro announced his originality in the early 1960s when he began to exhibit eccentric and, as it turns out, unforgettable steel sculptures made by welding and bolting together industrial members: works, such as the glowing yellow Midday, at once brutal and elegant, dextrous and clumsy. Midday stands alertly, reaching across space, its poised, vertical I-beams signalling for attention and its rows of bolts simultaneously testifying to the history of its making and forming a delicate contrapuntal drawing.’
K. Wilkin, Caro, Munich: Prestel, 1991, n.p.
‘The simplicity of Twenty-Four Hours, Caro’s first steel sculpture, belies its revolutionary character. The entire sculpture, constructed from three flat sheets of steel, sits directly on the floor unassisted by pedestal or plinth. The three plates do not represent or symbolise anything, nor do they suggest the functional geometry of architecture; but they do impose a movement through the piece which runs from front to back rather than up and down. This lateral development became characteristic of Caro’s work throughout the 1960s; in many cases it literally transformed the wall into a box.’
T. Fenton, Anthony Caro, London: Academy Editions, 1986, p. 10
'In these early works there is a humanity and an engagement with life lived that repositions sculpture at the core of life, where it can provide a ballast and evoke moments of lived time in which nothing is idealised or achieved but in which the seeds of our nature reside.’
A. Gormley, Anthony Caro, London: Phaidon, 2014, p. 23
‘His early drawings bear witness to the influence of Picasso – not the Picasso of the 1930s, not the Picasso whose montages were inspired by Julio González, but rather the Picasso of the man holding the lamb. The bodies are reduced to sketchlike, closely inter-connected forms; the black contours jostling on the picture plane and filling it right to the edges.’
D. Schwarz, ‘Heavy and Real’, Anthony Caro: Seven Decades, exh. cat., London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 2019, n.p.
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