Sir Anthony Caro Shows Portrait Heads Of His Wife

The portrait sculptures depicting the artist's wife Sheila, were made in 1988-89, a major instance of the occasional ventures into figurative work for an artist whose reputation is closely linked with abstract sculpture.

Famed for his pioneering sculptures in welded steel, Caro's epic but tender busts reveal a little known aspect of the celebrated artist's work and will be placed on specially built beech-wood plinths for their unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery's Balcony Gallery.

The display was conceived by Paul Moorhouse, the Gallery's 20th Century Curator. and comprises a sequence of heads of Caro's wife of 58 years, the painter Sheila Girling. Individually the heads are titled Day, Night, Morning and Evening, hinting at the different moods evoked by each piece. While Tate Britain's Caro retrospective of 2005 - curated by Paul Moorhouse - showed the sculptor's key abstract works, this new display offers a fresh perspective by focusing on Caro's recent figurative work.

Paul Moorhouse says: 'These extraordinary sculptures appear initially to contradict the very basis on which Caro's reputation rests. At a deeper level, however, these portraits - like his abstract sculptures - are suffused by a vital marriage of feeling and imagination.'

From the early 1960s, Anthony Caro (b1924) has been a hugely influential figure in the development of abstract sculpture. It is an area in which he continues to innovate, producing sculptures that test the limits of expression, often using pieces of found scrap steel welded together in arrangements the appeal of which is both cerebral and sensuous.

Since the mid-1980s, Caro's work has proceeded on an ever-broadening front, achieving a remarkable diversity in a range of materials including steel, bronze, lead, ceramic, silver, wood and paper. A little known aspect of this refusal to be tied to a single way of working has been his occasional return to figurative imagery.

Preceding his radical breakthrough to abstraction in 1960, the human figure was a principal preoccupation of Caro's art. In the last 20 years he has returned to this motif, making drawings and sculptures that are a response to an observed model or sitter.

The Caro display will be complemented by a special edition pack of postcards of the works together with a portrait of Sir Anthony Caro and accompanying text by Paul Moorhouse.

Anthony Caro Portraits is a loan display at the National Portrait Gallery through 7 September 2008 . --www.npg.org.uk