ANTHONY CARO : DRAWING IN SPACE; INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR AND FIGURATIVE AND NARRA

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 González 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 three 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.