Nicolas Party’s Pastel Worlds: Renaissance Echoes in Surreal Landscapes
By Emilia Novak
From Graffiti to the Gallery
Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland, Nicolas Party began his artistic path not in formal studios, but on city walls. As a teenager, he was part of a tight-knit graffiti scene, painting murals under cover of night and occasionally facing the consequences. “It’s fun, but spending nights in jail gets old,” he later remarked. By 21, Party left graffiti behind to pursue formal studies, first at the Lausanne School of Art, then earning an MFA at Glasgow School of Art. What followed was a journey through eras and geographies—Glasgow, Brussels, New York—each deepening his relationship with art history.
Party’s practice straddles past and present. He draws from Renaissance frescoes, 19th-century Swiss landscapes, Rococo pastelists like Rosalba Carriera, and Surrealist masters such as René Magritte. His preferred medium, soft pastel, has barely changed since the 18th century. Using it today is almost anachronistic, yet Party embraces its physicality and history to create bold, contemporary images that feel both luminous and surreal.
Critics and curators have noted how pastel gives Party’s work an unusual richness: velvety surfaces, pure pigment, and a matte glow that resists photographic translation. His still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, while traditional in subject, feel entirely of this moment. He has revived pastel as a serious, even radical medium, fusing deep art-historical knowledge with modern energy.
Portraits and Landscapes with a Twist
Party’s subjects—portraits, fruit bowls, and forests—might sound conventional. Yet he renders them with an unmistakable strangeness. His portraits feature androgynous faces with smooth skin and oversized, unblinking eyes. Set against flat, saturated backgrounds, the heads hover in space, their features often modeled with a gentle, eerie precision. Their unnerving calm evokes the stoic intensity of Ferdinand Hodler’s Swiss sitters, but with all realistic detail stripped away.
His landscapes, meanwhile, are dreamlike. Trees appear as colored silhouettes; hills roll in violets and teals; moons blaze red in indigo skies. In his celebrated series Trees (2015–2020), Party reduced groves to rhythmic vertical lines, playing with repetition and color. Viewers have likened his compositions to those of Félix Vallotton and even Dr. Seuss—stylized, stage-like, and fantastical. In Blue Sunset (2018), a turquoise river flows through lavender hills beneath a crimson orb, while pink trees dot the terrain like candy. The image is surreal yet serene, anchored by graphic clarity and Fauvist color.
This uncanny tone extends to his still lifes, where fruit might appear in monochrome or against black voids, glowing like stage props. Lately, he’s blurred the boundary between genres, transforming busts into vegetal or animal hybrids—a torso made of branches, a face sprouting leaves. In one print series, enigmatic heads composed of blocks and patterns float on colored fields, conjuring ancient myths and Surrealist puzzles. “They become like spirits,” Party said of these chimeric figures, echoing the hybrid beings of ancient Egypt or Magritte’s visual riddles.
A World You Can Walk Into
While Party’s drawings and paintings feel intimate, he often works on a monumental scale, using murals and installation to create immersive environments. It’s a natural evolution from his graffiti roots: he knows how to manipulate architecture and color to control perception.
Exhibitions often feature painted walls, custom plinths, and theatrical lighting. In Speakers (2017) at Modern Art Oxford, he turned the gallery into a procession of color-saturated rooms, each dominated by larger-than-life faces. At Beijing’s M WOODS Museum, his 2018 show Arches transformed the gallery into a faux-cloister, with pastel murals framed by trompe-l’oeil architecture. For the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Party painted a vast circular mural evoking an endless day—sunrise and sunset suspended in perpetuity.
Critics note his flair for theatricality. He often extends imagery beyond the canvas—birds flutter across gallery walls, jellyfish hover near portraits, or sculpted busts are elevated on marbled plinths to shape viewer movement. This immersive strategy blurs boundaries between artwork and environment, inviting visitors to step into a total artwork.
Dialogue with Art History
Party’s interest in historical techniques is more than aesthetic—it drives how he frames his exhibitions. In 2018, Brussels’ Musée Magritte invited him to create a show in dialogue with the Surrealist icon. Instead of conventional displays, Party painted site-specific murals that echoed Magritte’s palette and mood, creating visual conversations that were, at times, indistinguishable from the Belgian master’s own work.
In 2022, his Red Forest exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong introduced viewers to his lush, atmospheric style through both paintings and fresco murals. The interplay of nature and fantasy mirrored ongoing global concerns—climate change, the fragility of beauty—but with a poetic rather than didactic tone.
That same year, Party installed murals at major U.S. institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum. His 2024 project at New York’s Frick Madison may be his most ambitious historical gesture yet. Two of his pastel portraits hung alongside an 18th-century work by Rosalba Carriera—one of his greatest influences—in a curated dialogue across centuries. Party even painted the walls with oversized pastel draperies inspired by Old Master motifs, transforming a white-cube setting into a stage for memory, homage, and reinterpretation.
Collector Demand and Market Impact
As Party’s art has evolved, so has his standing in the market. Since joining Hauser & Wirth in 2019, he’s become one of their most prominent contemporary artists. His solo exhibitions routinely sell out, and waiting lists for new works are long.
In 2022, a major milestone underscored his ascent: Blue Sunset sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for HK$52 million (US $6.7 million), more than doubling his previous record. Christie’s specialists called the sale a “massive leap,” noting the rarity of large-scale pastel works by Party on the open market.
He now ranks among the most valuable artists born after 1980, with a growing institutional presence and broad collector appeal. The mix of art-historical reverence and visual boldness—his works pop on both Instagram feeds and gallery walls—helps explain his success. His colors are captivating; his imagery, instantly recognizable. Beneath the whimsical surfaces lie layers of technique and reference that reward repeated viewing.
Beyond original paintings, Party produces editioned prints, sculptures, and design objects. His Karma print series (2017), featuring stylized faces in electric hues, offered a more accessible entry point for collectors and has risen in value since. He’s also translated his portraits into sculptural forms and even textiles—such as a 2017 woven blanket bearing a surreal head—expanding his creative reach and collectibility.
Contemporary Relevance and Lasting Appeal
What makes Party’s work resonate today? In part, it’s his balance of timeless form and contemporary twist. His subjects—trees, faces, clouds—are familiar, but rendered in impossible colors or uncanny combinations. This blend creates a gentle disorientation that mirrors modern life: beautiful but slightly off-kilter.
There’s a reflective calm in his work that contrasts with digital noise. At a time of ecological anxiety, social flux, and visual saturation, Party invites us to slow down. His forests may glow with artificial colors, but they also suggest real-world fragility. Some murals evoke burning woods or flooded scenes, subtle references to climate change. “Humans are anxious about the future,” he once said. “The images click straight away to our unconscious.”
This ability to address contemporary unease without didacticism is part of his power. He channels timeless artistic devices—allegory, hybridity, myth—through modern forms, making space for wonder. His work feels personal and universal: equally at home in a child’s imagination or a collector’s salon.
A Painter for the 21st Century
Nicolas Party’s art lives at the intersection of tradition and invention. He revives pastel with the precision of a scholar, yet his images buzz with 21st-century immediacy. Whether drawing inspiration from Carriera, Magritte, or Dr. Seuss, he transforms those echoes into something uniquely his own.
He invites viewers into pastel dreamscapes where logic bends and time blurs—where trees glow pink, faces float like spirits, and walls shimmer with painted light. For museums, collectors, and casual viewers alike, Party’s world offers an escape and a reflection. It’s a place where the past speaks softly, the present dazzles, and the future feels just a little more magical.
By Emilia Novak
From Graffiti to the Gallery
Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland, Nicolas Party began his artistic path not in formal studios, but on city walls. As a teenager, he was part of a tight-knit graffiti scene, painting murals under cover of night and occasionally facing the consequences. “It’s fun, but spending nights in jail gets old,” he later remarked. By 21, Party left graffiti behind to pursue formal studies, first at the Lausanne School of Art, then earning an MFA at Glasgow School of Art. What followed was a journey through eras and geographies—Glasgow, Brussels, New York—each deepening his relationship with art history.
Party’s practice straddles past and present. He draws from Renaissance frescoes, 19th-century Swiss landscapes, Rococo pastelists like Rosalba Carriera, and Surrealist masters such as René Magritte. His preferred medium, soft pastel, has barely changed since the 18th century. Using it today is almost anachronistic, yet Party embraces its physicality and history to create bold, contemporary images that feel both luminous and surreal.
Critics and curators have noted how pastel gives Party’s work an unusual richness: velvety surfaces, pure pigment, and a matte glow that resists photographic translation. His still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, while traditional in subject, feel entirely of this moment. He has revived pastel as a serious, even radical medium, fusing deep art-historical knowledge with modern energy.
Portraits and Landscapes with a Twist
Party’s subjects—portraits, fruit bowls, and forests—might sound conventional. Yet he renders them with an unmistakable strangeness. His portraits feature androgynous faces with smooth skin and oversized, unblinking eyes. Set against flat, saturated backgrounds, the heads hover in space, their features often modeled with a gentle, eerie precision. Their unnerving calm evokes the stoic intensity of Ferdinand Hodler’s Swiss sitters, but with all realistic detail stripped away.
His landscapes, meanwhile, are dreamlike. Trees appear as colored silhouettes; hills roll in violets and teals; moons blaze red in indigo skies. In his celebrated series Trees (2015–2020), Party reduced groves to rhythmic vertical lines, playing with repetition and color. Viewers have likened his compositions to those of Félix Vallotton and even Dr. Seuss—stylized, stage-like, and fantastical. In Blue Sunset (2018), a turquoise river flows through lavender hills beneath a crimson orb, while pink trees dot the terrain like candy. The image is surreal yet serene, anchored by graphic clarity and Fauvist color.
This uncanny tone extends to his still lifes, where fruit might appear in monochrome or against black voids, glowing like stage props. Lately, he’s blurred the boundary between genres, transforming busts into vegetal or animal hybrids—a torso made of branches, a face sprouting leaves. In one print series, enigmatic heads composed of blocks and patterns float on colored fields, conjuring ancient myths and Surrealist puzzles. “They become like spirits,” Party said of these chimeric figures, echoing the hybrid beings of ancient Egypt or Magritte’s visual riddles.
A World You Can Walk Into
While Party’s drawings and paintings feel intimate, he often works on a monumental scale, using murals and installation to create immersive environments. It’s a natural evolution from his graffiti roots: he knows how to manipulate architecture and color to control perception.
Exhibitions often feature painted walls, custom plinths, and theatrical lighting. In Speakers (2017) at Modern Art Oxford, he turned the gallery into a procession of color-saturated rooms, each dominated by larger-than-life faces. At Beijing’s M WOODS Museum, his 2018 show Arches transformed the gallery into a faux-cloister, with pastel murals framed by trompe-l’oeil architecture. For the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Party painted a vast circular mural evoking an endless day—sunrise and sunset suspended in perpetuity.
Critics note his flair for theatricality. He often extends imagery beyond the canvas—birds flutter across gallery walls, jellyfish hover near portraits, or sculpted busts are elevated on marbled plinths to shape viewer movement. This immersive strategy blurs boundaries between artwork and environment, inviting visitors to step into a total artwork.
Dialogue with Art History
Party’s interest in historical techniques is more than aesthetic—it drives how he frames his exhibitions. In 2018, Brussels’ Musée Magritte invited him to create a show in dialogue with the Surrealist icon. Instead of conventional displays, Party painted site-specific murals that echoed Magritte’s palette and mood, creating visual conversations that were, at times, indistinguishable from the Belgian master’s own work.
In 2022, his Red Forest exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong introduced viewers to his lush, atmospheric style through both paintings and fresco murals. The interplay of nature and fantasy mirrored ongoing global concerns—climate change, the fragility of beauty—but with a poetic rather than didactic tone.
That same year, Party installed murals at major U.S. institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum. His 2024 project at New York’s Frick Madison may be his most ambitious historical gesture yet. Two of his pastel portraits hung alongside an 18th-century work by Rosalba Carriera—one of his greatest influences—in a curated dialogue across centuries. Party even painted the walls with oversized pastel draperies inspired by Old Master motifs, transforming a white-cube setting into a stage for memory, homage, and reinterpretation.
Collector Demand and Market Impact
As Party’s art has evolved, so has his standing in the market. Since joining Hauser & Wirth in 2019, he’s become one of their most prominent contemporary artists. His solo exhibitions routinely sell out, and waiting lists for new works are long.
In 2022, a major milestone underscored his ascent: Blue Sunset sold at Christie’s Hong Kong for HK$52 million (US $6.7 million), more than doubling his previous record. Christie’s specialists called the sale a “massive leap,” noting the rarity of large-scale pastel works by Party on the open market.
He now ranks among the most valuable artists born after 1980, with a growing institutional presence and broad collector appeal. The mix of art-historical reverence and visual boldness—his works pop on both Instagram feeds and gallery walls—helps explain his success. His colors are captivating; his imagery, instantly recognizable. Beneath the whimsical surfaces lie layers of technique and reference that reward repeated viewing.
Beyond original paintings, Party produces editioned prints, sculptures, and design objects. His Karma print series (2017), featuring stylized faces in electric hues, offered a more accessible entry point for collectors and has risen in value since. He’s also translated his portraits into sculptural forms and even textiles—such as a 2017 woven blanket bearing a surreal head—expanding his creative reach and collectibility.
Contemporary Relevance and Lasting Appeal
What makes Party’s work resonate today? In part, it’s his balance of timeless form and contemporary twist. His subjects—trees, faces, clouds—are familiar, but rendered in impossible colors or uncanny combinations. This blend creates a gentle disorientation that mirrors modern life: beautiful but slightly off-kilter.
There’s a reflective calm in his work that contrasts with digital noise. At a time of ecological anxiety, social flux, and visual saturation, Party invites us to slow down. His forests may glow with artificial colors, but they also suggest real-world fragility. Some murals evoke burning woods or flooded scenes, subtle references to climate change. “Humans are anxious about the future,” he once said. “The images click straight away to our unconscious.”
This ability to address contemporary unease without didacticism is part of his power. He channels timeless artistic devices—allegory, hybridity, myth—through modern forms, making space for wonder. His work feels personal and universal: equally at home in a child’s imagination or a collector’s salon.
A Painter for the 21st Century
Nicolas Party’s art lives at the intersection of tradition and invention. He revives pastel with the precision of a scholar, yet his images buzz with 21st-century immediacy. Whether drawing inspiration from Carriera, Magritte, or Dr. Seuss, he transforms those echoes into something uniquely his own.
He invites viewers into pastel dreamscapes where logic bends and time blurs—where trees glow pink, faces float like spirits, and walls shimmer with painted light. For museums, collectors, and casual viewers alike, Party’s world offers an escape and a reflection. It’s a place where the past speaks softly, the present dazzles, and the future feels just a little more magical.
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