Nicolas Party – Swamp

For his first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York City, Nicolas Party will transform the entire first floor of the gallery’s 22nd Street building into a vibrant world of visual enchantment. Featuring new oil-on-copper compositions, painted cabinets, signature pastel works and two site-specific murals that expand upon the artist’s most recent series– – “Swamp” and “Red Forest” – the exhibition will immerse viewers in Party’s idiosyncratic practice, which simultaneously celebrates and challenges conventions of representational painting.

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.

Gallery hours Tue–Sat 10 am – 6 pm

Exhibition Duration 07 September – 21 October 2023

www.hauserwirth.com

Location:
Hauser & Wirth New York
548 West 22nd Street
10011 New York, NY
United States