Anthony Caro: The Definitive Series on the Sculpture of Anthony Caro

Description

This is a boxed set of Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior, Anthony Caro: Figurative and Narrative Sculpture, Anthony Caro: Small Sculptures and Anthony Caro: Presence. The box has been specially designed by Anthony Caro. Since the mid-1950s, when Anthony Caro first announced himself as a young sculptor to be reckoned with, he has restlessly explored an unpredictable range of sculptural possibilities, testing limits and positing new ideas about the nature of eloquent three-dimensional objects. Through his expansion and transformation of the legacy of construction in metal pioneered by Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso, and further developed by David Smith in the USA, Caro has created a new, multivalent language of three-dimensional abstraction. The Caro pendulum has swung between extremes of linearity and robustness, abstractness and allusion. He has countered his mastery of line and transparency with investigations of our responses to mass and perceptions of interior and exterior, even experimenting with literally enterable sculptures. He has made rigorously abstract constructions that resemble nothing but themselves, intimate table-based pieces, monumental constructions like metaphorical architecture, and complex multi-part cycles of narrative works that pulse in and out of explicit illusionism. And more. The range and variety of Caro's sculpture notwithstanding, there are also common threads that run through all of his work, from the beginning of his career to the present. The five volumes in this set, each by a different critic, examine the various aspects of Caro's evolution individually, tracing the permutations of different themes - narrative, volume and mass, line and openness - throughout his work, over time. Each volume is independent and explores different territory, but cumulatively, by tracing these dominant themes, they provide new insight into the achievement of one of the undisputed giants of Modernist art.

Karen Wilkin is a New York-based curator and critic specialising in 20th-century modernism, with emphasis on sculpture. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she received a Woodrow Wilson fellowship and a Fulbright scholarship to Rome. She is the author of monographs on David Smith, Anthony Caro, and Isaac Witkin, and has organised numerous international sculpture exhibitions of artists including David Smith, Tim Scott, and Anthony Caro. She is Contributing Editor for Art for the Hudson Review and contributes regularly to The New Criterion, Art in America, and the Wall Street Journal.

'..The chief pleasure of these five volumes is the chance to pore over more than 350 colour plates of his work, subdivided into categories and with useful notes. A must for the library of any sculpture-enthusiast or student of modern and contemporary British art.' The Art Newspaper 'An attractive and richly illustrated five-volume survey. Much like Caro's continually overlapping series, these books reflect on related material from different perspectives, loosely organised by type or theme ... these books' main virtue lie in their close readings of individual works'. TLS 'The volumes constitute a thorough overview of the artist's career and development, offering valuable and fresh insights into his achievement as a modernist artist'. Choice 'This series can be recommended as an overview of one of the last century's pivotal sculptors.' The Art Book