PRESS PREVIEW: Saturday 27 November. Free bus from London departing Tate Britain, Millbank at 10 a.m.

New exhibitions in the Artists’ House

Edmund de Waal: night work
Anthony Caro: jewellery

27 November 2010 – 30 January 2011

The New Art Centre is proud to announce an exhibition in the Artists’ House that brings together works by Sir Anthony Caro and Edmund de Waal.

“Caro is not a modeller of jewellery but rather a sculptor of pieces in gold” (Kosme de Barañano, 2008). The recent departure into making gold or silver jewellery by Anthony Caro is the result of collaboration with Grassy, Madrid. Perhaps less well known than his sculpture, each item of jewellery is unique and reflects many of Caro’s sculptural concerns.

Like his sculptures, Caro’s jewellery combines functional or industrial elements to create intricate structures that are at once complex, architectural and mechanical. Their sweeping shapes of divergent planes and surfaces create a sense of great spontaneity, with light gliding over and bouncing off the play of forms. The intimacy of modelling such small-scale work with his fingertips, also served as a counterpoint to his large and monumental constructions.

“Pots are tactile before they are visual – they are made by fingers and need to be touched” (A.. S. Byatt, 2010). Small-scale, intimate and formed initially by hand, the ceramics of Edmund de Waal share essential qualities with the jewellery of Anthony Caro. For this display of new work in the Artists’ House, de Waal continues his preoccupation with vitrines, in which items are at once framed and yet held at a distance by the layer of glass, which blurs the threshold between the viewer and the ceramic vessels inside. Apertures in the vitrines allow natural light from above to flood in, highlighting the occasional glimpse of gold leaf on some of the vessel’s rims and changing endlessly with different times of the day.

In the early 1960s, Sir Anthony Caro’s abstract sculpture heralded a revolution and overturned conventional ideas about materials, scale, form and space. Caro insisted on the sculpture being placed directly on the ground and in the viewer’s own space, which subsequently became a touchstone for contemporary sculpture. There are examples of his sculpture in the park at the New Art Centre, including ‘Millbank Steps’ (2004), ‘Belt’ (1995), ‘Pleats Flat’ and ‘Pin up Flat (both 1974). Edmund de Waal is a leading ceramic artist. His work has recently been displayed at Tate Britain, Kettle’s Yard, Chatsworth and at the Victoria & Albert Museum where his ‘Signs and Wonders’ launched the new Ceramic Galleries. De Waal's work is held in over 30 public collections worldwide. De Waal’s latest book, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance’, was published recently to great acclaim.


PRESS PREVIEW: Saturday 27 November. Free bus from London departing Tate Britain, Millbank at 10 a.m. and leaving Roche Court at 3 p.m. Seats are limited. Please contact the New Art Centre to reserve a place. For further information about the exhibition and for images, please contact Stephen Feeke or Sarah Rancans on 01980 862244 o r nac@sculpture.uk.com.