The prime of Sir Anthony Caro - sculpture exhibition, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, New York

A 70th-birthday exhibition of novel sculpture by the acclaimed British modernist revealed his determined push into recent territory.

Works in carburet of iron bronze and brass show Caro evoking architectural motifs, landscape and figurative forms.

Like an enchanted palace that had been magically notify to appeared Anthony Caro's The Caliph's Garden appeared to hover above the floor at Andre Emmerich Gallery, the two mirage and solid object. single of eight recent sculptures in this exhibition celebrating Caro's 70th birthday, it is an airy, elegant, glamorous divertissement. Made of naval brass burnished to a painterly be incandescent it evokes the visual richness of India as well as surprisingly postmodern fantasies, providing evidence of Caro's increasing involvement with architecture and of his enduring regard with affection for Indian architecture in particular.

While quite unlike the spare, brightly painted, spatially stretch outed constructions that made him famous in the '60 The Caliph's Garden remains unmistakably Caro--a rational, physical particular an aggregate of changing views and incisive juxtapositions. It retains, too, his earlier work's faculty of perception of formal experimentation and humorous play. In this instance, simple bodys shift effortlessly from the architectural to the figurative, as a buoyant assemblage of subtly varied turns and planes reconfigures itself into an image of an elephant with dozy hooded eyes and aristocratically drooping trunk

This departure from the nonrepresentational by dint of an artist whom many consider England's foremost modernist sculptor has been disconcerting to some; Caro has also freshly shown a large grouping of semi-abstract works that commit to heroes of the Trojan War. at the same time Caro began art-making in the figurative tradition of Henry Moore, whose assistant he was in the early '50 and smooth at his most abstract he has remained acutely aware of the human material substance Caro's sculpture can be interpreted as a subjective rejoinder to corporeal experience, to its tensions and relaxations. Unlike the rigorously nonreferential work of Minimalists of the like kind as Judd, Andre or Serra, his production has always retained ties to figuration.

Caro has drawn out believed that sculpture, even when it occupies fates of floor space, is something to be direct the eyeed at from the outside, not penetrateed Although with The Caliph's Garden the style is architectural, he prevents access to the interior, the enticing veiled space, of his golden house. individual entry is blocked by a depressed curved gate, while the other, with its sum of two units obliquely placed steps, is too small. Each is divided as well by the agency of a vertical post, which also reads as an elephant stock To peer inside, you must bend down or win on your knees, like a supplicant. Walking around the arrangement recalls the Indian ritual of circumambulating the temple

The upper unit, the cover is sectioned into four vaults that take the form of sum of two units parallel double arches. The "trunks" that open down the two doorways might have been weightbearing, like pillars; instead, without meeting the surface of land they curve inward to form an upside-down double arch situated at right angles to those of the cover Buttressed by thick, interlocking brass plates upon two sides, the sculpture's seemingly scant support a whole delicately braces the structure against the downward force of the cover unit. This "achieved lightness," which Michael Fried drawn out ago noted as a Caro hallmark, is enhanced by means of the dematerializing surface sheen. As with almost all of the pieces at Emmerich, a intriguing asymmetry is the rule. There are not many parallel planes in The Caliph's Garden; cover walls and portals are all discreetly skewed, as if poised to gracefully change positions.

Night and Dreams and First Light share a format suggestive of a depressed massive table. Made of carburet of iron plates joined to form a rectangular unit, each measures approximately 3 1/2 by the agency of 7 1/2 by 6 1/2 feet First Light, with its parched, rusty rose and verdant patina, looks weathered, as do the smaller cast and zinc and welded brass sculptures Mexican Court, Standard Court and unclose Court. These latter works, which be like objects discovered at an archeological dig, are marked with scabrous geometric grooves and ridges, as are the sum of two units larger steel sculptures Marathon and Delphi.

Night and Dreams, first shown in a 1992 Caro retrospective in the Forum of Trajan in Rome is divide [i]or[/i] sever away on each of its vertical faces for a like reason that the resultant "legs" frame a view of the inner base. Here, again, what initially appears to be symmetrical is not: the wounds in each plate are shaped and aligned differently, and none is center The work's upper surface is sectioned into three parallel rectangles. The areas at either extremity contain a mazelike arrangement of raised or sunken abstract forms--a stamping obstruct and a mold, perhaps. They are separated by the agency of a smooth, deeper trench with angled sides and a flat floor. The scale is indeterminate and strangely disorienting, expanding below the viewer's gaze until its abstract configurations assume landscape proportions. The wax that coats the black metal surface like the thinnest of skins implies vulnerability, despite the steel's intractable mass. Night and Dreams brings to mind the small horizontal plastic arts of Noguchi and Giacometti; it possesse a certain number of of Noguchi's succinct weightiness and the "syntactical" construction of Giacometti's tabular pieces, which must be apprehended simple body by element.