Caro’s coming to Norwich
In May of this year, an exhibition of works by the internationally renowned sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro (1924-2013) will take place in Norwich, England. Items on display span a period from 1951 through to 2011, with 20 works on public view for the first time – some annotated by his mentor, Henry Moore.
Fêted for his monumental, brightly coloured aggregations of objects, Caro was a 1960’s revolutionary who knocked gallery sculpture off its pedestal and into the real-world plane. Shifting sculpture away from the plinth re-positioned work in the realm of the ‘real’ rather than the illusionistic; a profound and unprecedented change in sharing the space for artistic address and audience reception.
Curated by Professor Neil Powell, the research underpinning this exhibition explores a different side to Caro, showing the early signs of the artist’s move away from the figure and towards abstraction. These glimpses into Caro’s archive reveal the artist as a fearless and prolific innovator, rejecting material and aesthetic convention and narrating by implication, the passing of the industrial age.
Neil Powell 