27 April 2010
Tony Caro Keeps It Real
Via Bloomberg.com - Interview by Farah Nayeri
April 28 (Bloomberg) — Anthony Caro works in a vast warehouse stacked with dockyard leftovers.
Arriving at his north London studio each day, the 86-year- old sculptor has tea and biscuits with a few assistants, then gets down to the dirty, noisy business of making art.
Elderly Man Gripping Enormous Tool With Both Hands.
Caro is currently showing 13 new works at London’s Annely Juda Fine Art. Bulky creatures of steel and cast iron, they seem human, though Caro never meant them to give that impression. In just 18 months, he has made 43 of these upright sculptures.
“I’ve purchased a forklift truck, which makes a lot of difference,” says the artist over coffee in his studio living room, a wool scarf wrapped over his cardigan. “What used to take a morning or a day now takes 10 minutes.”
Caro, who sports a Hemingway-like white beard, is considered the godfather of British sculpture. At an age when peers might hang up their tools, he heads down new paths, displaying an appetite for life that his new works exude.
On his to-do list is a sculpture, three blocks long, that will run down the central reservation — the broad strip separating northbound and southbound traffic — on New York’s Park Avenue.
Traveling up or down the avenue, he says, “you’re going about 30 miles an hour, so you’ve got to make a sculpture which goes with you.” The project is on hold: “The police, the traffic, all that has to be resolved before I can start.”
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The most a Caro work ever fetched at auction was 1.4 million pounds (then $2.45 million), paid in February 2006 at Sotheby’s London for “Sculpture Two” (1962). By contrast, Jeff Koons’s most expensive sculpture — “Balloon Flower – Magenta” (1995- 2000) — sold at Christie’s London in June 2008 for 12.9 million pounds (then $25.8 million).
The works in Caro’s new show range between 55,000 pounds ($85,107) and 320,000 pounds, according to the Annely Juda gallery.
“It’s a different world,” he says of today’s market. “The crazy-price things, I think, are destructive of the art because people get too conscious of money.”
Caro remembers a time when, after an exhibition, friends would ask how it went or whether critics liked it. “Now they say, ‘Did you sell?’” he says. “It puts the wrong emphasis.”
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