Photo of Nicolas Party by Axel Dupeux; Photo of Xavier Salomon by Marco Furio Magliani
In Conversation: Nicolas Party & The Frick Collection’s Xavier Salomon
On the occasion of the exhibition 'Exemplary Modern. Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Contemporary Artists' at Hauser & Wirth 69th Street, and in tandem with the site-specific installation ‘Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera’ at The Frick Collection, please join us for a conversation with artist Nicolas Party and The Frick’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Xavier Salomon.
The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth examines the versatility and enduring legacy of Swiss avant-garde master, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and juxtaposes examples from her oeuvre with new and existing work made by contemporary artists. Nicolas Party will present an ensemble of bright, polychromatic ‘Head’ sculptures set against a black and white photographic mural employing archival photographs of Taeuber-Arp’s puppets and theatrical stagings--settings that have helped to inspire some of Party’s previous two-dimensional and mural works.
Utilizing a similar correlation between the art historical and the contemporary, Party is also currently featured in an installation at The Frick Collection that combines Rosalba Carriera’s ‘Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume’ with a suite of pastel portraits and mural works by Party.
This event is free, however, reservations are recommended.
About Nicolas Party
Born in Lausanne in 1980, 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 paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, installation works, and sculptures, including painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome. His brightly-colored androgynous figures vary in scale from the handheld to the monumental, and are displayed on tromp l’oeil marble plinths of differing heights that upend conventional perspective. Party’s early interest in graffiti and murals—his projects in this arena have included major commissions for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles—has led to a particular approach to the installation and presentation of his work. He routinely deploys color and makes architectural interventions in exhibition spaces in order to construct enveloping experiences for the viewer.
About Xavier Salomon
Xavier F. Salomon was born in Rome and grew up between Italy and the United Kingdom. He was educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he received his BA in art history, his MA and PhD, with a thesis on ‘The Religious Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (1571-1621)’. From 2006 he was the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery, where he curated exhibitions on Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, and Anthony van Dyck. In 2011 he joined the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Curator of Southern Baroque, in charge of Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th century, French 17th-century and Spanish paintings. In 2014 Dr. Salomon curated the monographic exhibition Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice at The National Gallery in London. Since 2014 he has been Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection in New York. His main areas of expertise are art and patronage in 17th-century Rome, and especially the Aldobrandini family, and the Venetian painters Paolo Veronese and Rosalba Carriera. He is currently working on a new catalogue raisonné of Paolo Veronese’s drawings, and on the catalogue of Spanish paintings at the Frick Collection.
About Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889 – 1943) is one of the most important artists of the twentieth-century avant-garde and is considered a pioneer of Constructivist art. Reconciling extremes with confidence—Dada and Geometric Abstraction, fine art and utilitarian objects—Taeuber-Arp’s works boldly engaged with the intellectual context of international modernism. Through her multi-faceted approach to media, she challenged traditional hierarchies between fine and applied art, and asserted art’s urgent relevance to daily life. Taeuber-Arp defied categorization during her brief career through her work as a painter, sculptor, architect, performer, choreographer, teacher, writer, and designer of textiles, stage sets and interiors.
