Anthony Caro’s sudden death at eighty-nine in October 2013 shocked everyone close to him. Up to his last day in the studio, Caro seemed invincible, even immortal. His appetite for making sculpture was as insatiable as ever. His energy, admittedly now fueled by after-lunch naps, was undiminished, and the demands he made on himself, aesthetically, were, if anything, even greater than before. Caro was proud of his earlier work, but he remained famously uninterested in revisiting the past. His passion and interest were entirely for the sculptures in process and those to come. Never complacent about what he had done already, however radical and however accomplished, Caro always focused on new challenges and new possibilities, on materials not yet explored, and on new conceptions of what a sculpture could be. As he often said, “You make rules for yourself and then you break them.”
The last works he completed played large sheets of transparent, often colored, Plexiglass against steel and massive wood timbers in large structures that were at once insistently present and elusive. In the 1960s, Caro had used expanded metal mesh in some of his most ambitious, space-greedy constructions, delighting in the way the mesh planes, transparent from some angles and opaque from others, were at once there and not there. His last sculptures, with their thick, transparent elements, pushed this paradoxical condition even further. He had become fascinated with the seemingly impossible notion of making a sculpture without an exterior—the opposite of
