Curiosity: An art practice as a way of looking

About

Julie Caves at the Crypt Gallery. The exhibition is located a 5-minute walk from the Frieze Art Fair, in Central London during Frieze Week. Julie Caves' first major solo exhibition presents work from the past two years, 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, Caves has sensitively curated a largely site specific show comprising of Colourist painting, sculpture and installation. What are you looking at? The artist peers at you on a huge scale, an intriguing look, wondering who you might be, and why you're here at all. This close cropped self-portrait mirrors how you might feel about this show, huge eyes full of Curiosity. This show is all about that fascinating conundrum that will endlessly be debated in pubs and cafes all around the world: what is art? Art, to Julie Caves, is all around us. There's a fine line between a work of art and the art of nature, and she is constantly walking the tightrope between the two. This is most notably seen in her large window paintings, where she has created a series of works of views through windows, some with 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. An installation composed of textured glass and obscured plant pots behind express the same celebration of the world in which we live; I looked out a friend's window into the garden and the effect of the dimpled glass and the objects beyond looked like an impressionist painting". So why shouldn't it be brought into the gallery and be called art?