Caro steel sculptures in Oxfordshire fields
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- "Heavy Metal" at Michael Hue-Williams's Albion Barn and Fields in south Oxfordshire juxtaposes Anthony Caro sculptures fashioned from reclaimed steel and salvaged factory, shipyard and farm machinery with works by his successor James Capper.
- Anthony Caro, who died in 2013 and helped create London's Millennium Bridge, is celebrated for repurposed scrap metal; the show features "Erl King" (built around a ship's anchor), "Star Flight" in galvanised steel, and "Slow Passage," a cattle crush with parts painted red.
- James Capper's kinetic sculpture "IRIS" uses a repurposed industrial grabber whose parts open like flower petals, and another piece in a converted tractor-barn gallery mounts fierce-looking nipping blades on a girder like stag beetles squaring up.
- Capper originally applied to weld for Caro, who told him to go back to his own studio — Capper now works from a studio on an old military airfield in Wiltshire, and his catalogue interview with the senior artist is part of the show.
- Albion Barn's woods were planted by Michael Hue-Williams's father Giles as a rewilding project before the idea became fashionable; Giles was killed by a swarm of bees while working in his orchard on the same property.
- The show is free to view by booking through the website, open Thursdays and Fridays, not suitable for under-12s, and deliberately has no gift shop or cafe — a thatched pub over the garden wall is reportedly picking up extra customers.
Why it matters: A well-known art dealer's private south Oxfordshire estate becomes a free, by-appointment public sculpture venue, staging an intergenerational pairing between one of Britain's most influential postwar sculptors and a kinetic-art successor in a setting the co-curator calls "very British but fun." The family-owned land — once a father's rewilding project turned memorial orchard — gives the commercial gallery an unusually personal, low-infrastructure pitch.
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