Nicholas Juett
National Exhibitions
Nicholas Juett has exhibited at the Royal Opera House in London, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and at the Salon Des Arts.
In 2003, Isobel Johnstone (Senior Curator at the Arts Council for England) nominated Juett for an exhibition for the newly refurbished Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. He was accepted and exhibited a series of works around the theme of interiors in the modern world: the TV screens are blank, ready for us to choose what we want to see, while in the background scenes of man-made vehicles in space tempt us to go beyond the confines of our small worlds.
The show moved to the Salon des Arts, Kensington, London, as part of an Entente Cordiale celebration in May 2004.
Later in 2004, Juett’s work was selected by Canadian video artist Mark Lewis and Scottish artist Claire Barclay for the Kettle’s Yard Open 2004/5.
“The English country house conjures images of domestic order and civilisation. The transformation from defended castle to stately home was contrived by architects and landscape gardeners to create an idyllic world for a newly peace-loving, cultured and leisured class. Those days have largely gone but the houses remain, open now to a broader leisured class who pay their entry money to learn how it was done and buy their cans of National Trust emulsion to bring home something of the idyll. Jim Ede, in setting up Kettle’s Yard, consciously pursued the country house model to make available a haven, a place of respite, from ‘this rapidly changing world’.
“Nicholas Juett’s paintings allow no respite. With a palette far removed from the subtle tones of National Trust colour charts the classical calm of these spacious rooms is shattered by a cacophony of 21st century living and, the artist would argue, the underlying history of exploitation on which these houses were built. In each painting a sprawling doll or ghostly mannequin speaks of a military past while the blank blue screen of cable TV – and each painting is named after a different make – brings us sharply into the here and now. Ironically it is only the screen that is blank. For the rest it is colour against colour, brushstroke against brushstroke, clutter against clutter. Even the views from the windows, contrived to expand the sense of spaciousness, close in on the room.
“Returning to Cambridgeshire, having lived and worked in New York, Juett transplants his experience of modern city living and modern painting onto our ideal home and paints a kaleidoscope of every neurosis of guilt laden past and crisis filled present.”
Michael Harrison
Director, Kettle’s Yard 1992-2011
Detail from ‘Sony’ (see below)
