Artist: Anthony Caro

To inaugurate the 2026–2027 season, Templon presents a landmark exhibition dedicated to the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, bringing together in Paris for the first time a group of works from The Kenwood Series (2003–2004), one of the artist’s most significant late bodies of work and rarely exhibited in Europe.

A former student of Henry Moore and deeply influenced by David Smith and the art critic Clement Greenberg, Anthony Caro is widely recognized as one of the leading figures of post-war British sculpture. During the 1960s, he revolutionized sculptural practice by dispensing with the traditional pedestal and placing his works directly on the floor, fundamentally redefining the relationship between sculpture, space and viewer.

Throughout his career, Caro continually expanded the possibilities of sculpture through an extraordinary diversity of materials and forms. While his early work established him as a pioneer of abstraction, his later practice increasingly embraced allusions to the body, landscape and narrative.

Following decades devoted to abstract sculpture, the early 2000s marked a new chapter in Caro’s work. The Kenwood Series stands among the most accomplished expressions of this late period. In 2003, the artist worked alongside the German master ceramicist Hans Spinner near Grasse in the south of France. This collaboration proved transformative, introducing stoneware into dialogue with steel, the material that had become synonymous with Caro’s sculptural language.

The ten sculptures presented at Templon’s Grenier Saint-Lazare gallery combine stoneware, stone and steel in compositions that evoke fragments of landscape and the human figure without ever becoming overtly representational. Together, they reveal Caro’s growing interest in figuration and narrative while maintaining the formal inventiveness that defines his work.

The series takes its title from Kenwood House in London, where Caro exhibited during the 1990s. The experience of presenting his sculptures within the historic house and its surrounding landscape profoundly informed his thinking about the relationship between sculpture, architecture and site, questions that resonate throughout The Kenwood Series.

At the heart of the exhibition stands Witness (2003–2004), one of the most ambitious sculptures of the series. Measuring 2.80 by 2.20 meters, the monumental work appears to emerge from the ground, confronting visitors with a powerful physical presence. As Caro remarked, “It speaks to you in a one-to-one way.” Rather than representing a recognizable subject, the sculpture invites viewers to pause, move around it and experience it bodily, transforming scale, light and surrounding space into integral elements of the work itself.

The Kenwood Series represents the culmination of more than four decades of experimentation, bringing together abstraction, figuration, architecture and material in a sculptural language of remarkable freedom and complexity. Presented together in Paris for the first time, these works offer a rare insight into the final and most poetic developments of Anthony Caro’s practice.