Table Piece CCXXXII. The Dance

Anthony Caro was one of the great sculptors of the 20th century. He embraced full abstraction after meeting the critic Clement Greenberg in 1959 and travelling to New York, where he came into contact with the sculptor David Smith and painters such as Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, who were working on the autonomy of painting from the perspective of anti-illusionism and full Colour-Field abstraction. His painted steel sculpture, which he presented in 1963 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, was based on improvisation, similar to that of the aforementioned painters, resulting in a fully abstract sculpture.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Caro’s Table Piece series followed a new intuition, proposing that sculpture could spill beyond its base. This series engages in a complex process of negating the pedestal by means of forms overflowing their own limits in all directions. Table Piece CCXXXII: The Dance grows similarly to a very free arabesque, just as its title encourages us to relate to the annotation of a body’s movement, dancing in space.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio