Writing Piece "Spick", 1978
Wood and Steel, 19" x 37" x 9 1/2"
Anthony Caro was born in 1924 in New Malden, a suburb outside of London, England and died in 2013, in London. One of Britain’s most distinguished sculptors, Caro was knighted in 1987. He received an M.A. in engineering from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, in 1944. After serving in the Fleet Air Army of the Royal Navy during World War II, he studied sculpture at Regent Street Polytechnic and attended the Royal Academy Schools in London. From 1951 to 1953 he was an assistant to Henry Moore. He taught at St. Martin’s School of Art in London from 1953 to 1981. In 1954 he began modeling figurative sculpture in clay and plaster. In 1967 he was given his first retrospective at the Rijksmuseum Krōller-Müller in the Netherlands, and since then he has been featured in major exhibitions throughout the world. He was commissioned to create a work for the 1978 inauguration of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His first visits to Greece in the 1980s inspired a body of work that includes After Olympia, his most monumental work to date. Intensely physical, Caro’s work suggests a kind of primal struggle between rigid geometry and organic forms. Other recurring themes include the play between void and solid, frame and infill, and concave and convex.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.