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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 landscapes, 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. 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 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) lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally including recent solo exhibitions at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon (2021); MASI Lugano (2021); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2019); M WOODS, Beijing (2018-2019); and Magritte Museum, Brussels (2018).

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Selected Images

Selected media

  • Exhibition walkthrough of Cascade (2023)

  • In conversation with Michel Draguet

    On the publication of Magritte Parti (2020) and the eponymous exhibition at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

  • In conversation with Eric Troncy

    On the occasion of Grotto (2019)

  • In conversation with Joost Declercq

    On the occasion of Three Seasons (2017)

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Nicolas Party

    texts by Stéphane Aquin, Stefan Banz, Ali Subotnick and Melissa Hyde, published by Phaidon Press, 2022, 160 pages, English

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  • Nicolas Party
    Rovine

    texts by Tobia Bezzola, Michele Robecchi, edited by MASI Lugano, published by Scheidegger & Spiess, 2021, 176 pages, English, German and Italian

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  • Nicolas Party
    Magritte parti

    text by Michel Draguet, published by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2020, 80 pages, available in English, French and Dutch

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  • Nicolas Party
    PASTEL

    text by Melissa Hyde, published by The FLAG Art Foundation, 2020, 236 pages, English

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  • Nicolas Party
    Pastel

    text by Nicolas Party, published by KARMA, 2017, 184 pages, English

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