Anthony Caro

Is there any artistic connection between the design and construction of Chinese stainless steel sculpture and Anthony Carlo's structural sculpture? Let's learn about this contemporary sculptor, Anthony Carroll, who is called Smith's successor. During his visit to the United States in 1959, Carol met Kenneth Noland, Morris Lewis and sculptor David Smith. This contact became a catalyst and prompted him to make a decisive and significant change in his artistic creation. " I realize that there will be no loss in abandoning history... Americans show me that there are no obstacles and rules... When you understand that the only limit of sculpture or painting is whether it realizes its own purpose, not whether it is art, you will feel great freedom. " He believed that the change of his works in the 1960s was the result of his "efforts to eliminate any form of works related to gypsum and clay". He began to create with beams and iron plates. At the same time, the difference between him and Smith is also obvious. Unlike Smith's works, Carol's works are usually flat, occupying both space and ground. The base of the sculpture has been canceled, and each sculpture occupies a large area, which is more direct for the audience than traditional sculpture. Smith's sculptures are often placed in the open space, while Carro prefers courtyard space. The scale and openness of the work bring the audience into a world of color and space. Most of his works are painted in a single tone, and deliberately choose colors that make people unable to judge the texture and weight. Carol thought that when he painted his work, he wanted to make it look more direct: there was no artistic intention, no homesickness, and no obvious feeling with something. In his hands, the hard material has an amazing soft feeling. Some people think that his work is more or less figurative, and its prostrate sculpture looks like the skeleton of Moore's huge woman after being skinned.

Carol also teaches at the St. Martin School of Art, which has had a great impact on the young generation of British sculptors. Most of these artists emerged in the 1965 "1965: A New Generation" exhibition, including Philip King and William Tucker, the outstanding representatives of British minimalist sculptors.

Since the end of the 1950s, a new branch of abstract art - Minimal Art has emerged. Its reflection on sculpture is called primary structure. The form of expression is to simplify the shape to the simplest geometric form, and use industrial steel to assemble it into a huge and powerful structure, making it a work of art integrated with the environment and space. Anthony Carlo is one of the most original sculptors in this art style.

After his retirement, Carol received an engineering degree from Cambridge University in 1944, and began to study sculpture in 1946. From 1947 to 1952, he transferred to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and worked as an assistant to the famous sculptor Henry Moore. After 1953, he taught at the St. Martin School of Art in London. In 1959, Carol met David Smith, a famous American sculptor and representative of the lowest art in the United States, and was deeply influenced by him and began to create the primary structural style. "Noon" is his representative work of this period.

"Noon" is made of bridge steel through welding. It is a steel plate oblique facade structure, with a bright and pure orange paint on the surface, giving people a visual effect of dazzling sunshine at noon, and has a strong modern industrial color. In the work, the structural relationship between several plates is handled with full charm, which is both like children's toys and like the seats in the courtyard. It is bright and comfortable, and there is movement in the quiet.

Carol believes that sculptures are not necessarily monumental collections, as long as the materials are displayed in the space, it is enough. "Noon" is very simple in structure. It only emphasizes the spatial extension of the steel plate, and only constitutes the aesthetic factor through its hardness and unified color. This work fully reflects the simple structure of the primary structure, which is the artistic form that pursues.

In the past 30 years, Carlo's studio has been located in a former piano factory in Camden, London. There are iron T-beams, aluminum tubes and steel plates everywhere. These are the raw materials he created. Of course, sometimes, Carlo also uses wood and ceramics. Carlo's creation is completely intuitive and almost never draws sketches. He said that I must see the materials face to face. Under his command, the assistants put things together, but that doesn't mean that a piece of work has been completed, and this semi-finished product will remain in the studio. I don't know when Carlo will come back and process it again, until finally, the work says "I am me". The waiting process may be only a moment, or a year.

"I don't have any creative principles," Carlo said. In this way, it sounds a bit disappointing from an artist. As the successor of Henry Moore, he started from the ball-shaped copper image, and in the 1960s brought sculpture art into an unknown field with his abstract and colorful steel structure works. The old artist in his early eighties could retire with honor, but he never considered to stop his creation. From the appearance, he has not changed much for many years. He always wears a three-piece suit with the style of an English gentleman, but his heart seems to be more and more passionate. "I want to remain open and not lose any possibility," he said.

At present, Anthony Carlo is mainly busy with his large-scale retrospective exhibition, which covers Carlo's works in the past 50 years. This is the British people's high evaluation of the old master of sculpture. You know, so far, no other living artist can hold his own retrospective exhibition in Tate. Such a noble honor also means hard work for Carlo. In the other room of the studio, Carlo placed a 1:20 exhibition hall model, and the works to be displayed were also made into small replicas in proportion. Then, he found the most representative works in each creation period, and moved around in the exhibition hall model to achieve the best visual effect.

In the entrance hall of the exhibition hall, the first thing visitors should face is Anthony Carlo's biggest work so far, the giant ladder Millbank Steps created with rusty steel in 2005, and then the series of works The Last Judgment created in 1999 will greet them. This series of works, composed of 25 sculptures, which strongly inspire people to examine the ugliness of human nature, was collected by the most loyal collector of Carlo's works, an industrialist from Schwarzenegger, Germany. Through the "Bell Tower", visitors will face some installation works about crime and punishment, atrocities and war, such as the "Gate of Heaven". The work is made of materials that Anthony Carlo most often uses: rusty steel, scorched wood and burnt sharp clay. The cracked surface of these materials indicates a kind of decay, while the half-open door of heaven also indicates hope. In the house next to his studio, Carlo built a showroom for himself, which was filled with small tabletop sculptures showing his art development process. Carlo is a very influential artist after World War II, and also works as a teacher in the St. Martin School of Art. With his openness, he has cultivated several generations of sculptors with different creative styles. His teaching concept "sculpture can be any form" guides his students to develop in different directions. For example, the earth artist Richard Long likes to use stones to form a circle to express his creative intention, while the pop duo Gilbert&George created "singing sculpture".

Ian Barker is a biographer of Anthony Carlo and an old friend of Carlo. He manages Carlo's gallery in London all the year round. He called Carlo a "revolutionary" because he "removed the sculpture from the base and placed it directly on the ground, so that the audience could see it from an equal height and be in it". Carlo himself hopes that his works can give people a feeling of closeness when they talk with each other.

It is not like people think that just giving up the base of the sculpture created the abstraction of Carlo's works. One year before the creation of the first non-figurative work "24 Hours" in 1960, Anthony Carlo had invited his figure sculpture down from the base. It was a huge female body sitting on a bench, with both feet touching the ground directly. This work was created in 1959 and no longer exists.

Anthony Carlo is a late artist. He didn't begin to create his life in the real sense until he was 35 years old. In his own words, his goal is to create sculpture works with more attention to facts and feelings. In other words, it can be understood that "female body" is a decisive step, but it is not enough to express all his creative intentions. The physical meaning of a work displayed in the room is obvious, but it is still too concrete. It expresses something else. For this work, it represents people, not a pure feeling. "I had a feeling at that time that people formed an obstacle to my creation," Carlo recalled. "If I want to make my works more expressive, I can only make them more abstract. I have no choice."

In 1959, Anthony Carlo visited the United States, which was of decisive significance to his creation. At that time, the American art world was full of the wind of awakening and tried to break out of the cocoon of European classical modernism. This atmosphere infected Carlo. Carlo was impressed by the conversation with the painter Kenneth Noland and the critic Clement Greenberg. Especially for the latter, it is suggested that Carlo, if he wants to change his artistic style, he should first abandon his habits. Therefore, after Anthony Carlo came back, he abandoned the materials he had used for a long time - clay, gypsum and copper, and instead bought steel, iron and aluminum alloy scraps from scrap merchants. He also learned metal processing methods such as welding and riveting. From then on, he followed Nolan and began his own road of abstraction. But our modern Chinese sculpture focuses on the creation of body and face.

In the first abstract sculpture finally completed in March 1960, Anthony Carlo used a typical element of Kenneth Nolan's work, a circular flat plate, then riveted it with a beam, an upright triangle and a backward inclined square, and then painted the whole structure with dark brown oil paint. From this "24 Hours", Carlo has embarked on a long road, and it is a road that he does not know where to go. "I found something, but I know nothing about it," Carlo said later. "I can only go on and see what will happen."

What happened later was a new kind of sculpture art. As the saying goes, everything is difficult at the beginning. After the first work was hard, the creation became more and more easy. Carlo devotes himself to the emerging sculpture consciousness "weightlessness" advocated by Greenberg. The 1962 work "One Morning" is painted in bright red, reminding people of a bird taking off from the ground. Other works in this period seem to be shaking. In 1963, the White Chapel Art Museum in London held an extremely successful exhibition for Anthony Carlo's original abstract works, with an incredible number of audiences. The sensational effect of those works is really incomprehensible nowadays. In the exhibition manual, the American critic Michael Fried wrote: "People can regard Carlo's works as a gifted dancer, dancing. Carlo himself, however, compares his creation to the composer's notes to compose music." Until today, Anthony Carlo still works in this way, and the surprising elements still exist.

All things, whether bent or folded, whether welded or riveted, whether cut or spliced, are artistically processed by Anthony Carlo in his own way, and even he uses paper to make abstract reliefs. He looked for inspiration from the works of great painters such as Monet. Some of his works, such as the Tower of Discovery created in 1991, made many people have the impulse to turn it into reality, thus triggering a discussion on the relationship between sculpture and architecture. That is why Carlo was invited to participate in the design of Norman Foster's Millennium Pedestrian Bridge on the Thames.

Today, a younger generation of British sculpture artists, such as Matt Franks, 35, requoted the creative techniques of Carlo's abstract works in the 1960s, while Anthony Carlo, who never stopped, is one step ahead of others. In 1992, Carlo heard Hans Spinner, a German ceramic artist who worked in the southern French city of Glaser, say that he could burn pottery completely different from others. The cooperation with Spinner has brought Carlo back to the concrete world bit by bit. For this, those who have always appreciated him do not agree with him. The Trojan War, written in 1994, can clearly identify the human form; "The Last Judgment" also has obvious image elements, and the "Proof" created in 2004 brought this development to a temporary peak: for the first time, Anthony Carlo created a large standing figure, a soldier, because he was ashamed of his behavior, covered his face with his arm. It is also a question worthy of discussion whether urban sculpture reflects the will of artists or shows the characteristics of cities or regions.

As for the retrospective exhibition held at Tate Art Museum, Anthony Carlo hoped to attract more young people first. To this end, he asked the Art Museum to lower the threshold and cancel the tickets for a special exhibition for the first time. He himself has started the creation of new works. "Nobody wants to do nothing. The studio is the best place for me," Anthony Carlo said.