Nicolas Party (b. 1980)
A Swiss artist working across a wide range of media, Party is best known for his vividly colored paintings, painted sculptures, monumental installations, prints, and drawings. A figurative artist, he frequently depicts landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of everyday objects, employing a vibrant color palette infused with surrealist motifs. After his early years in graffiti and street art, he shifted to pastel, using the medium to construct dreamlike worlds that envelop viewers through daring color and striking visual compositions.
To heighten the viewing experience, Party often creates large-scale wall paintings that serve as immersive backdrops for his works within gallery and museum exhibitions. His figures are characterized by rounded forms, wide, expressive eyes, sensual features, and an androgynous appearance that deliberately blurs the line between male and female. His work engages in a dialogue with the paintings of renowned 19th-century Swiss artists such as Felix Vallotton, Ferdinand Hodler, and Hans Emmenegger.
Party lives and works between Brussels and New York. He is represented by the internationally renowned mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, as well as five additional galleries, including Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. His work has been exhibited extensively around the world, including in New York, Los Angeles, Brussels, Zurich, Beijing, and Paris. Several of his works have sold at auction for more than $1 million, while his record-setting painting, Landscape, achieved $3.27 million at Christie’s in 2021.
Bottom Line:
A versatile figurative artist whose bold palette and surreal imagination have made him one of the most distinctive painters of his generation.
