Jedd Novatt

Jedd Novatt was born in New York City on 5 March 1958 and trained in literature and sculpture at Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1980, before continuing his studies at the Lacoste School of the Arts in France from 1980 to 1981. He opened his first studio in Tribeca in 1981 and held his first solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in 1993. In 2002 he relocated to Europe, and he has since divided his time among studios in Paris, Provence, and the Basque region of Spain — a transatlantic life that has shaped both the physical scale and the cultural register of his practice. In 2022, Le Figaro Magazine profiled him in a feature titled Jedd Novatt—Un Américain à Lacoste, reflecting the degree to which his work has become embedded in the European cultural landscape without losing its American roots.

Novatt works primarily in sculpture, and his ongoing Chaos series stands as the defining body of his mature output — large-scale steel constructions that balance precarious geometries against one another with a quality of arrested motion. Chaos Vascos II (2008) appeared in the Beyond Limits exhibition, bringing the series to an international audience in a high-profile outdoor context, while Chaos DDC (2019) is permanently installed at the Jardin Anglais near Château de Rolle on Lake Geneva, demonstrating the series' capacity for site-specific dialogue with landscape and architecture. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University, and Siena Heights University, and a permanent installation is sited at the University of Miami.

Novatt's exhibition history spans institutions and venues across Europe and the United States. Solo presentations have taken place at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, the Museum of Art in Boca Raton, La Piscine — Musée d'Art et d'Industrie André Dilgent in Roubaix, and Brown Harts Garden as part of Westminster Council's City of Sculpture Festival in London. Sotheby's at Chatsworth has also hosted his work. In 2025, two significant solo exhibitions opened concurrently: Jedd Novatt: Monotypes and More at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Quantum State at Waddington Custot in London, the gallery that represents him. Together these presentations affirm a practice that continues to evolve across both two- and three-dimensional forms, commanding sustained institutional attention on both sides of the Atlantic.