ART
Anthony Caro |
Written 30 January |
Monday 06 September, 10:00Galerie Daniel Templon, 75003 [map]Anthony Caro
In 2008, France paid tribute to one of Britain’s greatest sculptors,
Sir Anthony Caro, with a major commission to work on the Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Bourbourg church in Northern France, resulting in the extraordinary Chapel of Light.
Galerie Daniel Templon presents a collection of the artist’s most recent works, Upright Sculptures. They reflect the influence on his work of the remarkable achievement that is the Chapel of Light. An astonishing expression of creativity and energy, the series opens up a new chapter in the way the 86-year-old artist works.
After the spatial restrictions of a commission, Anthony Caro focuses on the sculpture’s dimension as object. He incorporates cast—off objects into the Upright Sculptures — drinking trough, rail sleepers, mooring post — whose original purpose is thus forgotten. In rusted steel, cast iron and wood, compressed inside the vertical structures that give them their name, the sculptures seem to be on the point of imploding. These works reflect Anthony Caro’s quest to create sculptures “with no exterior”, where all the significance lies in the depth.
Born in 1924 and knighted by the Queen of England in 1987, Sir Anthony Caro has taken the norms and even the definitions of sculpture in new directions. Throughout his long career, from his passionate pursuit of abstract art that made him king of modernism in the 1960s to his development of a more narrative line, the former assistant to Henry Moore has kept up a constant dialogue between the arts and experiments with different materials. Following a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2005, the inauguration of the Chapel of Light went hand in hand with three major exhibitions in France in 2008, held in Angers, Dunkirk and Gravelines.
