Anthony Caro is internationally acknowledged as one of the world's greatest living sculptors. The table pieces are amongst his most celebrated works.

In the words of Tim Marlow 'Caro is unassailably the most important sculptor in Britain and, according to a good number of critics, the most widely respected on the planet'.

In his abstract sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s Caro aimed to get sculpture down from its traditional place on a plinth and produced floor pieces and table works such as the present sculpture.

'I did want to stop sculpture being in its world and being stuck up there rather pompous and rhetorical - I do want to make the point that it is part of our lives more - so that the relationship between the art and the spectator is very much a one to one relationship.' (Anthony Caro, Interview with Edward Lucie Smith, 1982).

One of Caro's largest table pieces, Table Piece CCCXLIX has a sprightly linearity that characterises many of the finest of these works. Despite the use of rusted and varnished steel the effect is light and elegant.
According to the artist's studio Table Piece CCCXLIX was made in Caro's Camden Town studio from steel sourced in the north of England.