Once the Mayfair residence of the Archbishop of Ely, the Grade 1 listed London HQ of international gallery Thaddaeus Ropac is five stories of grand Georgian pomp, smartened up by Selldorf Architects and Cowie Montgomery Architects in 2017. It features a grand split staircase that spirals up from ground to first floor, one of the handsomest reworkings of stone in any modern art gallery and worth the visit regardless of who is on show.

The next series of works to hang on Ely House’s walls are canvases by Oliver Beer, and as abstract shimmers of colour do not at first glance seem to have much to do with the uniformly white, architectural neatness and immaculate decorative detailing surrounding it. But there is linearity, if a long one. The large paintings are profoundly about an architectural space, albeit one resided in many years before the Archbishop contracted Arts and Craft architect Sir Robert Taylor to craft his Palladian home from Portland Stone.



The Sky in the Cave, a series of new works by Beer, is a multi-media installation, comprising a sound installation and series of large canvases that speak to the earliest architectural history. Beer was invited to visit the Palaeolithic La Grotte de Font-de-Gaum caves in the Dordogne region of France, places he has now revisited many times to understand the aesthetic, acoustic, and atmosphere, sometimes alone and sometimes with some specially invited guests. These paintings are a direct result of the experience and qualities of the architecture of these ancient caves.

Beer has long been interested in the unique acoustic quality of any space – whether that be a grand concert hall, prehistoric cave, or even the inside of a Victorian Toby Jug. Every space of every scale has within its own perfect acoustic note, a product of its material, shapes, surfaces, and vibration. Beer can feel it intuitively, so knows where to start a process of working the specific acoustic frequency out through singing, listening, reading the environment, and in a way reaching back from the present towards the time each place was created.



With the Dordogne caves, that’s a reach of 17,000 years, but in doing such time travelling the artist discovers that perhaps his process may not have been as different to ancient ancestors who once stood in the same shelter. Over long hours, Beer negotiated each subterranean chamber of the caves complex, realising that the locations in which he stood to sing the perfect resonant note for each space happened to often also be the part of the cave that contained the most ancient wall paintings.

Working closely with Jean-Michel Geneste, the former Chief Curator of Lascaux, this relationship between the sonic moment and the visual art moment of each cave was properly researched, and has developed into a new avenue of research, rethinking what we knew about Palaeolithic caves and our ancient relatives’ relationship to sound, culture, and architectural presence. Had our early ancestors also stood in exactly the same location of these caves, singing the resonant note of the room, and marking the walls of this most sacred spot with artistic renderings of their worldly thoughts and fears?

The paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac have direct connection to that cave singing, both of Beer and perhaps those who sang thousands of years before. In a somewhat cave-like studio within one of South London’s countless railway arches, Beer creates his paintings in solitude. Placing each canvas horizontally, a huge speaker underneath plays a frequency, the vibration passing through the canvas and filling the compact industrial brick cave. Onto the canvas, Beer then scatters pigment which has a material connection to the earth of the Dordogne region, and then meticulously manoeuvres the large canvas to allow the pigment and sound come together to find its form.

It’s a process repeated countless times, building layers and layers of softly accreted colour, allowing through the artistic process a marrying of scientific exactitude, chance, and creative suggestion. The results, as the show’s title The Sky in the Cave suggests, carry that romantic timelessness of being subsumed within an earthen womb looking out to a distant sky, and through that all the psychological, religious, poetic, and artistic history it entails.

The paintings also carry with them a resonance of other art histories. There is the sublime of John Martin, the haze of Joseph Turner, the gesture of Julie Mehretu, and even the theory of Mark Rothko. This is not to say the series it is like any of them, but they are some of the voices that speak from the murmuring crowd within.



Beer doesn’t only visit the caves alone or with scientists. On occasion, the artist has taken musicians into the earth and back in time to share the unique acoustic experience. Eight of them, including eee gee, Hamed Sinno, Jean-Christophe Brizard, Mélissa Laveaux, Michiko Takahashi, Mo’Ju, and Woodkid, were invited in and asked to perform their personal earliest musical memory. Beer recorded their renditions, resonating various folk tunes within the ancient walls, and then combined them all together to form the soundtrack to his video opera The Cave – a work that premiered at the 2024 Lyon Biennale.

The eighth musician asked to collaborate was Rufus Wainwright who recorded À La Claire Fontaine, a piece the singer says he later learnt his mother had sung to him while in her womb, and a tune he has carried as an aural talisman through his life. Here, it makes perfect sense, sung within the body of the earth to an audience comprising not just his late mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle, but all the millions of voices and ears that passed the 17,000 years since the ancient concert hall was first occupied by artists.

In Ely House a vinyl player sits at the centre of the cave paintings. It amplifies the sonic assemblage of the eight musicians, drawing connections between how Beer visually renders the space and how the space itself renders voices of the selected singers. It helps dislocate the visitor from the palatial townhouse setting and into a timeless version of La Grotte de Font-de-Gaum, from a space of an architect to an architecture from nature.



When reading the canvases and hearing the acoustic, a visitor may be forgiven for thinking there is little connecting these two juxtaposed spaces, but both share the simple qualities of what is sought from shelter, whether man-made or man-found: protection from the elements and all that is outside; of scale enough to share with others to come together; enough natural light to read the space, but withdrawn enough to create intimacy; and walls to hold decorative renderings of inner and outer fears, loves, thoughts, and dreams.

With Oliver Beer’s series The Sky in the Cave, the two spaces of the Dordogne caves and Thaddaeus Ropac’s Ely House are perhaps even more closely connected. Squint your eyes, open your ears, seemingly they are one and the same.