Nicolas Party
Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party works across a wide range of different media. Primarily known for his colour-saturated paintings and murals, he also makes painted sculptures, pastels, installations, prints and drawings, and works as a curator. Party often paints portraits and still lifes of everyday objects, which he strips of all extraneous detail. Rather than creating faithful depictions from nature, he uses these seemingly innocuous subjects as springboards for an exploration into the art of painting itself. His concerns lie, therefore, less in the accurate depiction of nature, and more in its translation and transformation through colour, materials and composition. The challenge is to capture the essence of these subjects in new and revelatory ways, and in so doing to heighten their physical and emotional resonance. Clear forms, painterly precision, a vibrant colour palette and a keen eye for composition coalesce into works that are accessible and seductive but, at the same time, continue a long standing art-historical dialogue between representation and abstraction, and observation and the imagination. Party is also interested in the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art. To this end, he regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his paintings.
Nicolas Party (born 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland) completed a BA in Fine Art at the Lausanne School of Art before undertaking an MA at The Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2009. Party’s solo exhibitions include Arches, M WOODS, Beijing (2018-2019); Magritte Parti, Magritte Museum, Brussels (2018); Nicolas Party: Speakers, Modern Art, Oxford (2017); Sunrise, Sunset, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2017); Nicolas Party in the Garden Room, Palazzo Antinori, Florence (2016); Hammer Projects: Nicolas Party, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Pathway, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2016); Cimaise, CAN: Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel (2016); Boys and Pastel, Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2015). He lives and works in Brussels and New York.
DESCRIPTION OF 2019 INSTALLATION
Nicolas Party is a Swiss-born artist, known for his conceptual approach to the ideas surrounding portraiture. From July to September 2019, the Preservation Society of Newport County will host “Nicolas Party at Marble House”, an indoor and outdoor installation by Party, comprised of his three-dimensional sculptures and two-dimensional paintings in soft pastel. All the works are made for this exhibition, site-specific to Marble House. The installation will reflect Party’s interaction with eh space, his fascination with Alva Vanderbilt Belmont (the original owner of Marble House), and his experience working with marble as material. Influenced in part by the Surrealist movement, Party pairs elements generally considered “mismatched” in an attempt to draw the viewer’s attention to visual elements often overlooked.