Nicolas Party
Pool
Unveiled spring 2024
Intervention at hotel Le Sirenuse, Positano, Italy
Based at Le Sirenuse, an
iconic family-run luxury hotel in the Italian coast town of Positano, the 'Artists at Le
Sirenuse' program has unveiled its most ambitious project to date: a makeover of the hotel
pool by Swiss artist Nicolas Party. One of today’s most dynamic and talked-about
contemporary artists, Party has been invited by Le Sirenuse’s owners, Antonio and Carla
Sersale, to apply his vibrant visual imagination to the hotel’s much-loved terrace pool.
Party has created an exuberant play of overlapping and interlocking organic forms, transforming the view from the poolside terrace of mountains, sun, sea, and sky into a joyous, billowing aquascape that shifts and dances underwater. The New York-based artist worked closely with the technicians of leading Italian family firm Bisazza to translate his original pastel drawing into a pattern of glass mosaic tiles.
Party’s work is the latest addition to the hotel’s ongoing series
of site-specific series of commissions curated by art advisor Silka Rittson-Thomas, which
to date comprises works by Martin Creed, Stanley Whitney, Rita Ackermann, Alex Israel,
Matt Connors and Caragh Thuring, among others. Each artist is invited to Positano to
develop the work and to find a niche for it in the busy design scheme of a hotel that was
once the Sersales’ seaside villa. Transformed into a small hotel in 1951, it gradually became a showcase for the art and antiques collected by Antonio’s globetrotting father,
Franco Sersale.