Caro in Yorkshire @ Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle
Anthony Caro is considered one of our most important sculptors
He's a true pioneer whose work is now being reassessed by an exhibition across the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle (largely The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, with the work Aurora (2000-2003) outside the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds). This survey of work, a daring and comprehensive retrospective, reconsiders Caro’s importance to art history and his significant influence on the development of sculpture.
In the early 1950s Caro worked as a studio assistant to Henry Moore, and it was Moore who introduced Caro to the ideas of Modernism, a formative influence on his later work. In 1953 Caro began to teach at St Martin's School of Art, London.
His students later included Gilbert & George, Roelof Louw and Richard Deacon, and through Caro’s tutorage there was a rejection of the apparently staid and laboured figurative style of sculpture favoured by the past generation. Instead, artists turned to using affordable and everyday materials, and using the floor to display their work in a departure from conventional plinths and pedestals.
Created with the valuable input of Caro's estate, the exhibition Caro in Yorkshire reveals an industrious and courageous artist who explored the boundaries of materials like never before. Caro's work was somewhat overshadowed by the advent of Pop Art in the early 1960s, but his decision to unify his constructions by painting them in a single colour was as crucial to the course of art as Andy Warhol’s screen-printing techniques.
From the monumental sculptures such as Promenade (1996) displayed in the YSP grounds, to an exquisite display of scale maquettes shown at The Hepworth, the exhibition reasserts the gravity of Caro’s achievements spanning his early tentative steps in figurative form, such as Man Holding His Toe (1953), to the grand proposals of public sculpture such as the unrealised project for Park Avenue in New York, represented by a 2011 scale model.
The Henry Moore sculptures that are dotted around the Caro works appear achingly trivial in comparison. Moore, so often considered to be our greatest sculptor, is knocked from glory by Caro’s audacious and breathtaking structures.
This is a long overdue assessment of Caro’s complex oeuvre, past retrospectives having been required to edit his output due to limitations in space. The use of The Hepworth’s elegant galleries and YSP’s extensive parkland allows the biggest showcase of Caro’s work to date, magnificently curated – an exhibition his legacy deserves.
Runs until 1 Nov