Anthony Caro

I didn’t want them to be anything, to have the graspability of a figure or a statue. They had to be something that you really took time to understand visually and emotionally.
—Anthony Caro

Gagosian Beverly Hills is pleased to present thirteen early sculptures by the late Anthony Caro, some of which have never been seen in the United States. The exhibition has been prepared in close collaboration with the Anthony Caro studio.

Over the course of his sixty-year career, Caro continuously reimagined the relationship between viewer and sculpture. From his beginnings as an assistant to Henry Moore during the early 1950s, he worked to contort the figure to the brink of abstraction. Subsequent decisions to bypass representational imagery altogether, and to use bright colors to synthesize the bolted and welded metal parts that replaced it, marked a breakthrough in Caro’s quest to elicit a charged response that was as optical as it was corporeal. His rejection of the pedestal to place his works directly on the gallery floor, which resulted in a direct, one-to-one relationship between viewer and artwork, was perhaps his most radical and innovative revision of sculptural tradition.

Following a pivotal trip to the U.S. in 1959, Caro began a new approach to form, color, and presentation. Inspired by David Smith’s transposing of impulsive painterly lines into welded and forged metal, he cultivated an original lyricism from industrial steel and aluminum parts. His exuberant sculptures of the period unfold within the personal space of the viewer, shifting dramatically in appearance as s/he walks around them; although they mark a departure from the figure as subject, a sense of liberation from the concentrated weight, scale, and ordered naturalism of the body endures. The works are characterized by tensions between elements that are upright and leaning; rigid and curved; rectilinear and inflected, from the bright orange Capital (1960), in which a large steel square levitates beside fixed, level components; to Drop (1966), a straight yellow beam interrupted by an incongruous curve. In 1966, Caro commenced a series of Table Pieces: welded amalgams of hand tools and other parts that arc beyond and below the surfaces on which they sit.