NICOLAS PARTY
SWAMP
7 September – 21 October 2023
NEW YORK, 22ND STREET
For his first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York City, Nicolas Party transformed the first floor of the gallery’s 22nd Street building. New oil-on-copper paintings, cabinet compositions, signature pastel paintings and two monumental site-specific murals will immerse visitors in Party’s practice, which simultaneously celebrates and challenges longstanding and cherished conventions of representational painting through his uniquely singular, subversive style.
EXPLORE THE EXHIBITION
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter the first of two expansive pastel murals––a forest in flames. Party is known for conceiving his exhibitions as comprehensive environments, incorporating architectural interventions and extending the palette of his paintings across the gallery’s white walls. Heightening the powerful effects––formal and psychological––of his subject matter, Party has chosen to steep the surrounding walls in a rich maroon. Just beyond the pastel mural hangs a group of portraits featuring enigmatic figures paired with an animal that obscures their body. These creatures were inspired by the work of radical 19th-century French realist painter Rosa Bonheur, an icon of women’s independence who put the living world at the heart of both her life and work, placing animals at the center of her practice.
In contrast to the large-scale, enveloping pastel works on view, intimately scaled cabinet paintings sit upon marble trompe l’oeil pedestals and oil-on-copper paintings hang throughout both rooms of the exhibition. Here Party once again contemporizes all but forgotten classical mediums; just as his signature pastels achieved the height of popularity in the 18th Century, oil on copper was a fashionable and prevalent alternative to canvas during the mid-16th Century, while cabinets were most commonly made as altarpieces in medieval and Renaissance art. Party uses these mediums to express his recent fascination with pre-historic creatures of the Mesozoic Era, the second-to-last era of Earth’s geological history, in the oil-on-copper paintings and one cabinet.
UPCOMING EVENTS
In Conversation: Nicolas Party & The Morgan Library’s Isabelle Dervaux
Sat 7 Oct 2023, 11 am at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street
In Conversation: Nicolas Party & The Frick Collection’s Xavier Salomon
Tue 26 Sep 2023, 6 pm at Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street
June 1, 2023 to March 3, 2024 at The Frick Madison
NICOLAS PARTY AND ROSALBA CARRIERA
The Frick Collection presents a site-specific installation by the Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party (b. 1980) that combines Rosalba Carriera’s Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume with an ensemble of pastel works of Party’s own devising.
Installation view of Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera at Frick Madison, looking left Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.
On view at New York, 22nd Street
‘NICOLAS PARTY. SWAMP’ is on view now through 21 October 2023 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street. Please visit our location page to plan your visit.
About the Artist
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,...
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Current Exhibitions
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