The Audience and The Jury are available separately, but are actually meant as a diptych. Please also take a look at The Jury.
During the period in which Pieter jan Martyn created these works, he persistently returned to one motif: the stands of the Nuremberg trials.
Initially, he painted the dock and the gallery over and over again, refining them increasingly and sometimes in mirror image. In this way, the perspective shifts until there is no longer any certainty: are we looking at the audience, public opinion—the actual jury—or at the defendants themselves? All the works were initially titled “The Jury” to emphasise this duality.
Later, he broadened this to include audiences at popular cultural events. This echo reveals the staged nature of the tribunal: here, too, the dramaturgy of gaze, decor, and expectation is at play. The Audience thus becomes a double portrait—of justice as theatre and of ourselves as spectators who judge.