Nicolas Party, Portrait with an Eagle (2023), via Hauser & Wirth
Marking his first solo show with Hauser & Wirth in New York, the Swiss artist Nicolas Party has orchestrated an expansive and captivating show of new works that continue to underscore the artist’s mining of traditional painterly languages in concert with freely interpretive and expressive modes of depiction. Spread across the gallery floors of blue-chip dealers’ flagship space in Chelsea, Party’s work is a striking opening note in the fall calendar.
Nicolas Party, Mountains (2023), via Hauser & Wirth
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.
Nicolas Party, Mountains (2023), via Hauser & Wirth
Nicolas Party, Portrait with a Goat (2023), via Hauser & Wirth
The works continue the gently curving portraiture Party has established as one of his calling cards, figures with gently lit and subtly curving features, with a color palette that emphasizes contrast; faint skin tones and light blues negotiate with stark red and blue backdrops, giving each of the works on view a gentle, commanding glow. Party seems to innately understand the nature of the icon, an image that not only depicts the religious figure in question, but stands as a devotional in its own right, a testament to and object of veneration. These works are countered by a series of delicate landscapes, sharp, faintly illuminated mountain ranges, swampy scenes, and other moments of natural repose that seem to draw distinct dialogues between human and natural scenes of deep beauty and contemplation.
The show closes October 7th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Nicolas Party [Exhibition Site]
