Nicolas Party Portrait, 2025
Soft pastel on pastel card
19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (50.2 x 50.2 cm)
Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Born in Lausanne in 1980, Nicolas Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect. In addition to pastel paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, cabinets, oil on copper paintings, installation works, and sculptures, including painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome. He routinely deploys color and makes architectural interventions in exhibition spaces in order to construct enveloping experiences for the viewer. Based in New York, Party studied at the Lausanne School of Art in Switzerland before receiving his MFA from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland.