All you need to know about Nicolas Party

Our latest contemporary art monograph charts the rise of the Swiss art star

Nicolas Party may have broken his auction record at Christie’s in New York towards the end of last year, when his painting, Landscape, achieved a price of $3,270,000. But there was a time when Party willingly consigned his work for free, sending it out across borders, sprayed onto the bodywork of a high-speed locomotive.

As the artist explains in our new, comprehensive monograph – the first in-depth examination of this important contemporary artist’s work – he came to fine art via graffiti, and for 10 years, between 1991 and 2001, the Swiss-born painter travelled across continental Europe, to create work and meet other graffiti artists.

Landscape, 2020. Soft pastel on linen, 114 x 97 cm. Artwork © Nicolas Party

“I became very skilled at using spray paint to create designs that got more and more elaborate,” the artist tells Stéphane Aquin, Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in our new book. “But graffiti was never really about the visuals – it was mostly about the act. What mattered was to do it in the most visible and difficult location. For example, painting the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse), the fast train from Paris that stayed overnight in Lausanne, was greatly valued by your graffiti colleagues. It was very difficult to paint on it because of security. You only had twenty minutes to paint between security-guard rounds. But the reward was big – your painting would be in Paris the next morning.”

With strong gallery representation on both sides of the Atlantic, and a dedicated following throughout the art world, Party might be a little less excited by the prospect of one of his works ending up in a great cultural metropole. Nevertheless, his new book’s passages on graffiti, as well as the texts detailing Party’s early career, working in an animation studio, offers valuable insight into his stylistic development and formative experiences.

“With his vibrant palette and singular style, Party puts a refreshing spin on the traditional genres of portraiture, still life and landscape,” writes the Los Angeles writer and curator Ali Subotnik in this new book. “His depictions  of fruits and marble bowls are timeless and cannot be situated in any era or location. They also convey an impression of weight and volume (likely informed by Party’s experience working in 3D animation in the early 2000s), which deepens with the soft curves afforded by the pastel and the hyperreal marbelizing.”

Portrait With An Owl, 2018. Soft pastel on linen, 110 x 180 cm. Mural: oil on wall. Installation view at Magritte Museum, Brussels, 2018. Artwork © Nicolas Party

This new book, the latest in Phaidon’s on-going Contemporary Artist Series, reproduces many of those portraits, still-lifes and landscapes, as well as comparative works by other artists, in among its 200 illustrations.

The monograph details Party’s education in both Lausanne and at the Glasgow School of Art, and his subsequent success, having relocated to New York. It details both his works on canvas (or more often, pastel on linen), as well as his sculptures, his painted stones, his ceramics and his murals, often executed as part of one of his highly acclaimed solo exhibitions.

Co-authors, Stefan Banz, a Swiss artist, writer and curator, and Melissa Hyde, associate professor of art history at the University of Florida in Gainesville, join Subotnik and Aquin, to guide us through the life and work of this dynamic rising star within the contemporary art world.

Nicolas Party, New York, 2020.

Nicolas Party is the first book to examine in totality his career to date - and is a must-read for collectors and followers of the contemporary art scene. To find out more and order your copy go here.

Nicolas Party