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拍品專文
Classically trained, Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party is best known for revitalizing the traditional genres of portraiture, still life and landscape. Yet Party strips his subjects of extraneous details and instead focuses on transforming shape and color, materials and composition. Utilizing a flat, graphic style and vibrant palette, Party turns sitters, objects and landscapes into emotive and seductive symbols. Party’s forms look less like traditional forms, but instead like three-dimensional, bulbous and hollow forms, perhaps related to the artist’s ten years working as a 3-D animator.
In Portrait (2014), executed in soft pastel, an androgynous, blue-shirted, turquoise eye-shadowed figure looks out past the viewer like a flat Fauvist icon. With the rigidity of an Egyptian hieroglyph, the figure’s bulbous face is topped with blonde spherical hair, punctuated with piercingly vacant blue eyes and pursed, full red lips. The royal blue shirt and stiff white collar tightly frame the figure’s extremely long neck. Party does not create these portraits from life, but instead makes portraits inspired by other portraits and the history of portraiture.
Inspired by Picasso’s use of pastel in a neo-classical work titled Tête de femme (1921), Party started utilizing the technically challenging medium. The soft perfection of the chalk pastels, usually applied with the artist’s fingertips, draws the viewer back to the surface and the materiality of the medium. Party invokes the connection between one’s fingers and touch to massage an image into existence. He emphasizes how today’s technology, such as the iPad, are devices created to be used with our fingers – contemporary culture is well-versed in swiping, pressing and touching screens as a means of interacting with a surface.
Looking at the paradigm of art history, Party translates the tradition of portraiture into a dialogue of contemporary vernacular. When asked about his practice, Party remarks, “I’m trying to work with subjects that are not original. Subjects that have been, and still are, painted all the time. Like a portrait, or a cat. What fascinates me about these topics is their capacity to regenerate themselves at any period of history, and still be relevant to us. I also believe some subjects are always painted because they are an infinite source of meaning and inspiration” (N. Party, quoted in F. Tattoli, "Talking with the Swiss painter Nicolas Party," Fruit of the Forest, December 2016).
Nicolas Party completed his BA in Fine Art at the Lausanne School of Art and MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. Since graduating in 2009, Party has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at important institutions worldwide, such as the Magritte Museum, Brussels (2018); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and the Modern Institute, Glasgow (2016).
In Portrait (2014), executed in soft pastel, an androgynous, blue-shirted, turquoise eye-shadowed figure looks out past the viewer like a flat Fauvist icon. With the rigidity of an Egyptian hieroglyph, the figure’s bulbous face is topped with blonde spherical hair, punctuated with piercingly vacant blue eyes and pursed, full red lips. The royal blue shirt and stiff white collar tightly frame the figure’s extremely long neck. Party does not create these portraits from life, but instead makes portraits inspired by other portraits and the history of portraiture.
Inspired by Picasso’s use of pastel in a neo-classical work titled Tête de femme (1921), Party started utilizing the technically challenging medium. The soft perfection of the chalk pastels, usually applied with the artist’s fingertips, draws the viewer back to the surface and the materiality of the medium. Party invokes the connection between one’s fingers and touch to massage an image into existence. He emphasizes how today’s technology, such as the iPad, are devices created to be used with our fingers – contemporary culture is well-versed in swiping, pressing and touching screens as a means of interacting with a surface.
Looking at the paradigm of art history, Party translates the tradition of portraiture into a dialogue of contemporary vernacular. When asked about his practice, Party remarks, “I’m trying to work with subjects that are not original. Subjects that have been, and still are, painted all the time. Like a portrait, or a cat. What fascinates me about these topics is their capacity to regenerate themselves at any period of history, and still be relevant to us. I also believe some subjects are always painted because they are an infinite source of meaning and inspiration” (N. Party, quoted in F. Tattoli, "Talking with the Swiss painter Nicolas Party," Fruit of the Forest, December 2016).
Nicolas Party completed his BA in Fine Art at the Lausanne School of Art and MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. Since graduating in 2009, Party has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at important institutions worldwide, such as the Magritte Museum, Brussels (2018); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and the Modern Institute, Glasgow (2016).