- Venue
- Hepworth Wakefield
- Location
- Yorkshire
As one might hope, sculpture has been at the forefront of programming at the Hepworth. Recent highlights have included the great Lynda Benglis show earlier in 2015, to which this Caro retrospective is a commanding companion. There is a lot of strong sculpture on display, and the most animated underline Caro’s sometime tendency towards the bombastic. For example, his 1960 breakthrough sculpture Twenty Four Hours is very much present with its three primary shapes undeniable, and yet nearby is the wonderful Hopscotch from 1962. A delightful musical interlude composed of aluminium tubes and slats. Its horizontals are like the stave of sheet music and the slats and wider corrugated strips of aluminium, the notes. Whilst the horizontals remain precise and ordered, the slender linear notes dance around them. Their varying angles and inclinations ensure the sculpture softly twinkles with ever changing reflections of light as the viewer moves around. This is sculpture as jazz. And this is Caro at his best; defying gravity and making light of metal.
Despite the immense physicality of Richard Serra’s sculpture, he undermines the weight of steel by bending space to affect viewer’s proprioceptive systems. Caro’s modus operandi at its sharpest involves a different strategy; one based on deft control of physical balance and visual counterweight. This is most strikingly revealed in the table sculptures, which cling to the edges and taunt the void below. Some teeter on the edge, suggesting an imminent fall into the precipice. In Table Piece LIV, 1968, a section of open grille is lowered over the edge to mimic the table top.
Lap from 1969, epitomises the deftness of touch that Caro can bring to the game. The works flows, shifts, glides, thrusts and it projects energy just like Mark di Suvero’s girders. This table sculpture has actually fallen off the edge, with a semi circular beam just kissing the ground for stability. Operating in the margins and boundaries between states and disciplines was a prime concern for Caro, who, according to the exhibition literature noted “I’m interested in the edges of art. I’m interested in where things go over from sculpture to architecture, from sculpture to painting.” Other intriguing interactions with architecture include Ceiling Piece, 1979, which as the title suggests descends from on high. Its linear meandering redolent of David Smith’s steel drawings in space.
The show also features late works in which Caro introduced material transparency and translucency to his sculptures. Key to the harmony of Terminus, 2013 are two planar elements of translucent acrylic. The perspex makes light of the metal. Its red hue picks up the red underpainting on the industrial parts, now revealed through the scrapes of usage and what appears to be various sweeps with a sanding disc on a grinder. The perspex sheet is intriguing in that despite appearances, it is actually a thin layer of red laminated onto a much thicker clear sheet of acrylic. As such it represents a kind of illusion rarely seen in Caro’s work and suggests an openness to experimentation to the very end of his life. With that openness comes the possibility of not getting it quite right all the time, and some works on show fail to hit the target. But that’s just fine; there are more than enough genuinely great sculptures to make a trip to the Hepworth a necessity.
