Curiosity: an art practice as a way of looking
Julie Caves’ first major solo exhibition has taken over two years to create, with work celebrating beauty and its many juxtapositions: work and play, nature and synthesis, life and death.
Housed in the peaceful and contemplative 19th-century Crypt Gallery in
Kings Cross, this group of work includes eight series of paintings, sculptural
installations, an ongoing drawing series, an interactive work, and
installations created specifically for the Crypt space. The exhibition is located a 5-minutes
walk from the Frieze Art Fair and is also part of the Bloomsbury Festival 15–20
October. There will be a participatory artwork called A Third Colour on the
three Saturdays of the exhibition, whose participants will be documented for a
book and receive a certificate that ‘they are art’ as well as artist-led tours.
Special guest artist H Locke will have a large drawing installation.
Julie Caves’ work
celebrates beauty and its many juxtapositions: work and play, nature and
synthesis, life and death, macro and micro, Heaven and Hell. She is constantly
walking the tightrope between two ideas. This is most notably seen in her large
window paintings, where she has created a series of works of views through
windows, either panes in view so the window is quite apparent, and in other
compositions no pane is shown so the work resembles and references traditional
landscape painting. Reminiscent of
Gary Hume’s enamel Door Paintings from the mid-90s, instead of confronting us
with a barrier to a world beyond, Caves’ windows invite us to explore that same
world, and realise it really is quite beautiful.
Other concerns
within Caves’ practice intrinsically revolve around colour. Each of her large
scale abstract paintings (for which she is best known) are a record of a
process carried out by the artist; set rules and decisions are established to
start a painting (much like the invention of a new game), and devised as a
means of creating pathways into explorations of colour and texture.
Julie Caves says:
“I am very interested in the push-pull of visual space and the polarities of
ideas - object and ground, positive and negative, good and evil. I have always
looked at both sides of the coin, seen the hare and the duck. I am very
interested in the structure of the painting and my own kind of balance. Often
my method of closing-up, searching for rightness and negotiating each mark
results in a complexity nearly hidden in the final simplification, a subtle
activation. Sometimes it is a feeling of righting a wrong, one decision at a
time, heading down a path to more correctness.”
