Venice Biennale 2013: Anthony Caro/Marc Quinn, review Even the thousands of tourists tramping through St Mark's Square who have never heard of the Venice Biennale could not miss the presence of two important British artists in the city this summer. As well as pigeons and the basilica, the famous piazza contains enormous red banners advertising Anthony Caro's new exhibition at Museo Correr, while across the lagoon on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore an 11m-tall inflatable sculpture of a disabled woman ensures the visibility of Marc Quinn's show at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Although neither exhibition is officially connected with the Biennale, both are adjuncts to the international festival of art. Containing 28 works, the exhibition at Museo Correr offers a beautifully installed distillation of Caro's long career, including five brilliant examples of his classic colourful abstract steel sculptures from the Sixties. The show opens with Cadence (1968-72), a yellow construction consisting of two long poles floating above a low-slung plane of metal, and ends with Orangerie (1969), an unfeasibly suave and supple masterpiece, in which the artist somehow coaxed pieces of scrap metal including ploughshares into a complex arrangement of curving, flowering forms that, painted a rich red, resemble the late paper cut-outs of Matisse. Both are reminders of the artist's outstanding achievement: by removing sculpture from the plinth, he imbued it with a presence so palpable that to look at the work is to feel like we are encountering another human individual. Elsewhere a selection of less familiar ink-on-newsprint drawings from the Fifties represent the figurative work that Caro made in the tradition of modern Europeans such as Picasso before his breakthrough into abstraction, inspired by a two-month trip to America in 1959, when he encountered the welded-metal sculptures of David Smith. We also see recent work suggesting that Caro, who will be 90 next March, is still innovating: Venetian (2011-12), for instance, incorporates surprising sheets of translucent red Perspex. Robust yet elegant, Caro's sculptures look comfortably at home inside a museum. This isn't to say, though, that he should now be consigned to art history. With its enormous chunks of rusted steel, River Song (2012) has a slow-moving, lumbering presence, like a swollen river god laden with the heavy traffic of vessels of every description. Eliciting poetry out of junk, it would hold its own alongside sculptures by more fashionable names in the main exhibition of the Biennale, which prides itself on championing the vanguard of contemporary art. The quality of work in Marc Quinn's retrospective exhibition, by contrast, feels much more uneven. The strongest piece here is Self (2011), the latest iteration of the artist's ongoing project to make a cast of his head using his own blood every five years. Presented in a glittering refrigerated display cabinet kept at a regulated temperature of minus 17 degrees, this is the fifth self-portrait that Quinn has produced in this fashion since the original version made his name in 1991. With varying blotches of purple and red, like a steak taken out of the freezer and in the process of defrosting, his face now appears much more tired and careworn, emphasising the inherent fragility of the sculpture itself: if the chiller were turned off, the blood would melt into a formless mush, reflecting the precariousness of all of our lives. But Self is old news - and too much of the more recent work feels forgettable in comparison. The extravagant bronze sculptures of shells and orchids, the sleek marble statues of people with disabilities, the vast photorealist oil paintings including one of a recumbent pregnant fashion model who appears naked against a background of raw meat glistening like shiny wrapping paper ... The ideas behind these works share something of the dark intensity that animates the Self series - but their glossy and expensive execution seems designed to appeal to the oligarchs who line up their super-yachts along Venice's quayside during the Biennale. Elsewhere in the city a sea change is occurring: curators are exhibiting artists who make work with less conspicuous production values. Art this brazen, then, is starting to look out of date. Caro until Oct 27; information: correr.visitmuve.it. Quinn until Sep 29; information: cini.it