Room 2: A new reality for sculpture: 1960-1961 Installation shot at Tate The Horse (1961) Enlarge image

In 1959 Caro visited the USA for the first time. He met the abstract painter Kenneth Noland, who described his practice of keeping the canvas flat while he worked in order to avoid conventional ideas about composition. The idea of working blind, as it were, fired Caro's interest. On his return to London he bought steel from scrap yards and docks, and learnt how to use oxyacetylene welding equipment. The result was his first abstract steel sculpture: Twenty Four Hours 1960.

Nothing like it had existed before. Earlier sculptors had used solid, upright forms to represent the human body. Caro sought a purer, expressive language, eliminating figurative associations. Significantly, Twenty Four Hours stands directly on the ground. Eliminating the plinth situates the sculpture in the real world - as a thing in itself.

Twenty Four Hours 1960 Tate © The artist, Barford Sculptures Ltd.

"Twenty-Four Hours came partly by chance. I got half of it made and then stuck it up on chairs and it looked right there and I went on. [The sculpture consisted of] a round disc and a couple of other elements. all I thought to myself was, "That sculpture is right, it's the way I want it. I'm into something I don't know about and I'm going to keep going and see where I get to."

Anthony Caro interviewed by Noel Chanan 1974,
as quoted in Ian Barker, Quest for the New Sculpture, 2004, page 92.