NEW YORK, NY.- Marc Payot, Partner and Vice President, today announced that Hauser & Wirth now represents Swiss artist Nicolas Party in collaboration with Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Kaufmann Repetto in Milan, Modern Institute in Glasgow, Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich, and Karma in New York.

Born in Lausanne in 1980, Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for bold and otherworldly landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.

Hauser & Wirth’s first project with Party will be a solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 2020.

In addition to paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, installation works, and sculptures, including painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome. His brightly-colored androgynous figures vary in scale from the handheld to the monumental, and are displayed on tromp l’oeil marble plinths of differing heights that upend conventional perspective. Party’s early interest in graffiti and murals – his projects in this arena have included major commissions for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles – has led to a particular approach to the installation and presentation of his work. He routinely deploys color and makes architectural interventions in exhibitions spaces in order to construct enveloping experiences for the viewer.

The artist’s childhood in Switzerland imprinted upon him an early fascination with landscape and the natural world, and the influence of his native country places Party firmly within the trajectory of central European landscape painting. Points of reference in his work include celebrated 19th-century Swiss artists Félix Vallotton, Ferdinand Hodler, and to the figurative watercolor painter Hans Emmenegger. While Party eschews notions of direct influence from established historical movements, one can find within his works a 21st-century synthesis of the sorts of impulses and ideas that fueled Symbolism, Surrealism, and The New York School, the compositional strategies of Rene Magritte and Giorgio Morandi, and the visions of such self-taught artists as Louis Eilshemius and Milton Avery.

Marc Payot remarked, “We are thrilled to welcome Nicolas to Hauser & Wirth, where he joins an exceptional group of gallery artists changing the discourse around painting today, including Mark Bradford, Zeng Fanzhi, Lorna Simpson, Rashid Johnson, and Rita Ackermann, to name only a few. Nicolas has already established a unique place in the realm of contemporary painting through is masterful use of pastel – a traditional medium that in his hands seems radically new. As a Swiss artist who migrated Stateside, Nicolas has followed a path that resonates deeply with my own and that of Hauser & Wirth: his Swiss beginnings have led him to embrace boldly American influences that, in artistic terms, evoke the breakthroughs of such predecessors as Oldenburg, Avery, and Guston.”

Payot continued: “We look forward to developing new and ever more diverse international audiences for Nicolas’ art through exhibitions, publications, and expanded relationships with institutions and collectors. I am particularly delighted to have an opportunity to work again with Brendan Dugan and Karma in New York, with whom we enjoy a long relationship that has already included publishing projects and exhibitions with our gallery artists Ida Applebroog and Rita Ackermann, and the estates of Lee Lozano and Eva Hesse.”

Based in New York and Brussels, Party studied at the Lausanne School of Art in Switzerland before receiving his MFA from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. His work has recently been the subject of several important solo museum exhibitions, including ‘Nicolas Party: Speakers’ at Modern Art Oxford, UK (2017); ‘Nicolas Party: sunrise, sunset’, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2017); ‘Magritte Parti’ at The Magritte Museum in Brussels (2018), and ‘Arches’, a solo exhibition at M Woods in Beijing (2018 – 2019).

An exhibition of his work will open July 2019 at the Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island.