Jedd Novatt

By appointment only, Monday–Friday 10.00–18.00 

“I like the coalescence of intention and accident; "carving" steel, a fundamentally stubborn material, certainly leads to both.” 

Jedd Novatt, Paris, 2024

Downstairs in the gallery’s private viewing room, a tightly curated exhibition of Jedd Novatt spotlighting new and recent works is available to view by appointment. 

Novatt’s work addresses the fundamental forces which define our environment. His instantly recognisable work uses interlocking open frames to create ‘drawings’, resulting in compositions which play with shadow and depth, push and pull, gravity and weightlessness. Suspended in a status of near-collapse, his sculptural works reference the solidity and fragility of the human condition. ‘Jedd Novatt: Quantum State’ debuts three unseen sculptures ‘CS I’, ‘CS II’ and ‘CS III’, which are on display alongside recent sculpture and large-scale woodcut monotypes. The monotypes are part of a series that were recently exhibited in Novatt’s solo exhibition at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). 

Novatt refers to his new tabletop steel sculptures as ‘carvings’ and he creates a uniquely textured surface in which raw steel contrasts with residual paint. After painting this series, the sculptures are then scored and marked through processes of grinding; remaining patches of high gloss paint means that light bounces unevenly off the sculpture, adding to its sense of movement and dynamism, and to the overall rigour of the works. Novatt speaks of colour as ‘light and shadow’ and about the inevitability of a work in reaching its final composition. 

Novatt’s use of colour in his sculpture can be traced back to the artist’s early years in the 1980s as a young arts graduate in New York. Some of these early sculptures left parts of the ‘found’ rusted surfaces intact, creating a sharp contrast with smoothly painted surfaces of other elements. In some areas of  ‘CS I’, ‘CS II’ and ‘CS III’, the colour is worked into the skin of each work, giving it a time-worn appearance, an effect that Novatt connects with the influence of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of African totems which he often visited during this same period of his life in New York. In Novatt’s new series, the hierarchy between painting and sculpture is further examined.

“Jedd Novatt has been employing and manipulating key minimalist visual and material tropes — the cube, unyielding medium, towering scale — in order to evolve the now long-stalled project [minimalism] beyond its traditional static and reflexive nature.” 

Thomas Collins, Former Director, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Currently Neubauer Family Executive Director and President of The Barnes Collection, Philadelphia