Jedd Novatt

Jedd Novatt (b.1958, Brooklyn, New York) is an American artist renowned for his monumental sculptures which address notions of space, balance and gravity, through interlocking asymmetrical and quadratic shapes. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, in 1980, Novatt pursued sculpture at Lacoste School of Art, France (later merged with Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia). He returned to New York in the following year and had his first solo exhibition in New York at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. 

Novatt’s sculptures achieve a kind of ‘weightlessness’ through their dynamic compositions, in spite of the perceived weight of their industrial materials. Their intersecting shapes create open, cube-like forms and carve out internal space, so that the negative space itself becomes part of the composition.  Novatt’s towering arrangements allude to the primordial state of disorder and the structural tensions specific to sculpture: often his compositions seem top-heavy, and on the verge of collapse. Instability and irregularity, which are characteristic features of his work, give rhythm to the passive cubic matrixes, in turn allowing the structures to be liberated from their two-dimensionality  as they are deconstructed, dislocated and re-ordered. 

Novatt was first invited to participate in the annual exhibition Beyond Limits, Sotheby’s at Chatsworth in 2008 (and later in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2016). In 2019 three of his key sculptures were displayed in Chaos Construction at the V&A Museum, London. In 2021 Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) showcased Jedd Novatt: Monotypes and More, a major solo exhibition dedicated to his small-scale sculptures and their relationship to his two dimensional works on paper. Sculptures from his celebrated Chaos series are installed worldwide in prominent public collections, such as The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; La Piscine Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Roubaix, France; Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK; The City of Bilbao, Spain; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT;  SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and its sister institution in Lacoste, in the French Luberon Valley. His work has entered other important international public collections, including List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; and Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL.

Jedd Novatt lives in Paris, and divides his time between his studios in Paris; Ménerbes, Provence; and Basque Country, Spain.