There’s always been something fun about Anthony Caro’s work – even as it was being lauded for redefining the parameters of modern sculpture. Think of his monumental abstract pieces from the 1960s, when he first began welding huge hunks of found metal together but which he then painted in brilliant, primary colours, as if to undercut their gravitas. Or his smaller, tabletop assemblages of the ’70s, whose extremes jut and dangle teasingly over the surface edges.
None of this, though, quite prepares you for the sense of whimsy and abandon you get in this show of final sculptures, all made just a few months before his death in 2013. Uniting the works is the use of Perspex – a new material for Caro – with each piece featuring various upright or curved slabs that cut through or arc around his trademark cluster of reclaimed industrial objects. The result is a jarring, almost comical contrast between the battered, distressed metal and the sleek, shiny purity of the Perspex. Not only that, but the Perspex itself often comes in rich, zingy colours – translucent yellows and blues, hues titled things like ‘frosted lime zest – giving each piece a deliciously retro, vaguely childlike feel, like a giant toy. The steel funnels, buffers and bright red Perspex of ‘End of Time’, for instance, combine to suggest an oversized model steam engine.
Which isn’t to say that the works lack seriousness. Even the most eccentric constructions offer up a concentrated study of form, inviting you to scrutinise how various components stack and cascade, how different viewing angles reveal sudden, surprising aspects. Each sculpture becomes a kind of intellectual and aesthetic puzzle – keenly pleasurable and, in a work such as ‘Sundown’, with its elegiac echoes of a funeral pyre, extremely poignant.
Gabriel Coxhead