Room 1: Early work: 1950s Installation shot at Tate (from left to right) Seated figure (1951), Seated man (1951-2), Pulling on a girdle (1958-9) Enlarge image
	Man Taking Off His Shirt 1955 Collection Professor and Mrs King © The artist, Barford Sculptures Ltd.

After spending two years as an assistant to Henry Moore in the early 1950s, Caro began to develop an entirely independent outlook. Between 1953 and 1959 he made over thirty sculptures: strange lumpen figures, heads and animals, impressed with rocks, pebbles and fragments of cast objects. Reacting against Moore's smooth, carved forms, Caro investigated the expressive potential of clay - freely modelled and beaten, subject to the intervention of chance. He would drop and hit the soft material, so that the resulting shapes suggested forms which could then be developed imaginatively.

Caro's subject in these works is the experience of being inside the body: standing, turning, twisting, rising, lying on the ground, and so on. The sculptures depart from the literal appearance of the subject, appealing to the imagination and recalling a sense of how the action feels. There is an emphasis on the weight of the arms, the awkward twist of the body, the struggle against the downward pull of gravity. Other sculptures address more fleeting, subtle sensations such as inhaling cigarette smoke. These actions are ordinary and everyday, suggesting that, through expressing these familiar sensations, Caro's underlying concern is to explore the nature of being alive.