Anthony Caro

"First Drawings Last Sculptures"

Mitchell-Innes & Nash 

New York, 534 West 26th Street

One of the most influential names in modern sculpture, the British artist Anthony Caro is commemorated with two concurrent exhibitions in New York, following his passing in 2013. Bridging Upper East Side and Chelsea locations of Mitchell-Innes & Nash with Caro’s arresting abstract sculptures, First Drawings Last Sculptures offers a trajectory of the artist’s six-decade-long career as an innovative sculptor. Upon graduating from Royal Academy Schools in London, Caro worked as assistant to Henry Moore, followed by his introduction to David Smith, who influenced him to diverge from figuration to pursue an abstract visual language. 

Employing industrial materials such as steel, metal, bronze, and steel, Caro practiced a meditative and contemplative visual narrative in which the magnitude of his large scale three dimensional works usher the audience into an alternative realm. With their complex aesthetics and unconventional displays, Caro’s sculptures endure the medium’s rapid evolvement in response to technological improvements. The artist, who kept producing new work through the last stages of his life, had begun experimenting with Plexiglass in recent years, benefitting from the material’s sleek yet solid texture. These ambitious joint exhibitions also include a selection of paintings and ink on paper drawings, accompanying the artist’s voluminous sculptures in large scales. A fully illustrated catalog features an essay by art historian Julius Bryant who organized Caro’s exhibition at Tate Britain in 2014. “Moore had been the most famous sculptor after Rodin. Caro was the most famous after Moore. They were in some ways opposites,” wrote Norbert Lynton on The Guardian in response to the artist’s death at the age of eighty-nine.

On view through February 4, 2017