By 1971, Anthony Caro had been making free-standing, entirely abstract sculptures from recycled steel for just over a decade. Canal demonstrates the restless originality and consistent development Caro discovered in this medium. Using found and cut pieces of metal his process is essentially related to collage. Just as one might cut newsprint, coloured and textured paper before fixing them against one another, so Caro constructs his sculpture through the juxtaposition of three-dimensional elements. The American art critic Michael Fried has argued that Caro’s work from this period reveals “very plainly Caro’s special genius for juxtaposing – simply bringing together – a few wholly ordinary elements in ways that no one before him could have imagined, and, by so doing, making sculptures of truly breathtaking originality” [Michael Fried, ‘Anthony Caro’s Table Sculpture’, Anthony Caro: Table Sculptures 1966-1977, unpaginated] In his sculpture from the early seventies, Caro takes a significant departure from his earlier floor-standing work which tended to be sprayed bright colours offering them a smooth, shiny finish. The all-over painting of works like Yellow Swing (1965) provides some cohesion to a construction of disparate elements. Canal, on the other hand, bares its material openly: its rusted, textured components frankly reveal their collaged nature. The industrialism implied by Canal, in both title and form, shows the artist in his most robust manner. He studied engineering at the University of Cambridge before committing himself to art, so the presence of unpainted I-beams can be seen to reflect his education and continuing interest in construction. When viewed holistically, aspects of Caro’s career gradually develop an ever-greater interest in architectural space. The verticality of Canal with its overhanging, intersecting ledges anticipates even larger, later works like Emma Dipper (1977) and Palanquin (1987/1991) which evoke the dimensions of rooms or enclosed, manufactured spaces with recognisable ceilings, roofs, corners, and windows. In the nineties, Caro reflected that “Architecture has come to play an important role in my thinking during the past ten or fifteen years, but when I look back I think it was always there, even if only at the edge of my interest.’ [Quoted in Karen Wilkin, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior (London: Lund Humphries, 2009) p.10] Canal illustrates just how early this interest stretches back. As a work of serious scale at a turning point in Caro’s career, after masterworks like Early One Morning (1962, Tate), Canal can be seen as one of the next major steps Caro takes to invigorate his practice to establish a remarkable habit of innovation that would mark him apart from his contemporaries throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Fittingly in 1997, he was awarded the International Sculpture Centre’s Life Time Achievement Award for Sculpture.