{"id":7532,"date":"2015-07-22T23:58:42","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T02:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=7532"},"modified":"2015-08-18T22:08:20","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T01:08:20","slug":"daily-visual-22-07-15-anthony-caro-in-yorkshire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/daily-visual-22-07-15-anthony-caro-in-yorkshire\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Visual 22.07.15: Anthony Caro in Yorkshire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Caro<\/a><\/p>\n

With Barbara Hepworth off visiting at Tate Britain<\/a> in London, in Yorkshire a two-site exhibition opened this week, providing a thorough retrospective of the work of\u00a0Anthony Caro. Indoors at the Hepworth Wakefield<\/a>,\u00a0Caro\u2019s sculpture will be shown in the context of his career-long engagement with architecture, which became increasingly explicit across his later years. Meanwhile the Yorkshire Sculpture Park<\/a> will take as its focus the interplay between Caro\u2019s sculpture and the world of painting.<\/p>\n

Over 100\u00a0works will be displayed in total, spanning sixty years of Caro\u2019s career. The exhibitions are collectively\u00a0operating under the title\u00a0Caro in Yorkshire<\/em>,\u00a0and comprise a Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle initiative. They will be accompanied by seminars at the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery.<\/p>\n

At the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Caro\u2019s Promenade<\/em> (1996) is already one of the 500-acre site\u2019s prominent attractions, its graceful sequence of painted steel focusing the lower park and looking fixedly out over the lake.\u00a0Promenade<\/em> is regularly accompanied in the open air by\u00a0Forum<\/em> and Dream City<\/em> (both 1992-1994).<\/p>\n

For Caro in Yorkshire<\/em>, the YSP\u2019s Longside Gallery will exhibit some of Caro\u2019s earliest, small-scale, figurative work on paper and in bronze; opening out onto his initial experiments in painted steel, including Month of May<\/em> (1963). In the garden there will be a unique selection from his\u00a0Flats<\/i> series, made in Canada in rusted and varnished steel in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

The YSP\u2019s main centre will feature some of Caro\u2019s scale models. Across the YSP, the full extent of Caro\u2019s career\u00a0will be showcased, up to the Duccio Variations<\/em> (2000) and The Last Sculptures <\/em>(2013), which saw him utilising Perspex for the first time. Some of The Last Sculptures<\/em>\u00a0were first shown at Caro at Correr<\/em>, the major Italian retrospective of Caro\u2019s art which was held during the 55th Venice Art Biennale in 2013 \u2013 the exhibition\u2019s close coming just days after Caro\u2019s death, aged eighty-nine, in late October.\u00a0Several of these sculptures\u00a0drew heavily on C\u00e9zanne\u2019s paintings of card players.<\/p>\n

Beginning with Twenty Four Hours<\/em> (1960) and Caro\u2019s emergence from the shadows cast by Hepworth and Moore, the Hepworth Wakefield will also conclude by offering a UK premiere of some of The Last Sculptures<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Born in 1924, after earning a degree in engineering and serving with the Royal Navy, between 1947 and 1952 Caro studied at the Royal Academy Schools. In the early 1950s he briefly worked as an assistant to Henry Moore; and by the end of the decade his sculpture was already winning international acclaim. He first visited the United States in 1959, forming influential relationships\u00a0with the expressionist sculptor David Smith, and the abstract painters Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland.<\/p>\n

In the context of British sculpture, in the 1960s Caro proved the decisive break with figurative forms. His self-supporting sculptures typically stood alone, directly on the floor of exhibiting venues, with Caro demonstrating a keen and often controlling awareness of the surroundings which would interact with and influence the perception of his art. The first major Caro retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, straightforwardly entitled Anthony Caro: A Retrospective<\/em>. A year later he was presented with the\u00a0Key to the City of New York.<\/p>\n

In 1987, Caro and Frank Gehry collaborated in New York to construct a wooden \u2018Sculpture Village\u2019, demonstrating what they termed the practise of \u2018Sculpitecture\u2019. A decade later Caro would work with the architect Norman Foster and the engineer Chris Wise to design London\u2019s Millennium Bridge. Caro stated:<\/p>\n

\u2018In this century it was not the sculptors who revitalised sculpture \u2013 it was the painters. They were outsiders who understood the subject; nevertheless they were not trapped within its imagined regulations. I believe that now sculpture and architecture may be similarly nourished by one another.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

A comprehensive Caro retrospective was held at Tate Britain in 2005; but this promises to be Europe\u2019s biggest ever exhibition of Caro\u2019s work. Caro in Yorkshire<\/em> will run at both locations until 1 November. Beyond positive reviews in BBC Arts<\/a> and The Independent<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Mark Hudson in The Telegraph<\/em><\/a> has called it \u2018pretty much unmissable\u2019; while\u00a0Adrian Searle in The Guardian<\/em><\/a> affirms it is \u2018sculpture that can take your breath away\u2019.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n