MONTREAL.- Considered to be a major artist of our time, Nicolas Party is known for his meticulously composed pastels, his painted sculptures and his installations drenched in saturated colours. For his first exhibition in Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has given him carte blanche to create a dialogue between his works and a selection from the Museum’s wide-ranging collection. Through over 100 works and a series of monumental murals realized in situ, the Swiss-born artist presents a dreamlike experience on the theme of nature. The Museum’s galleries provide the canvas onto which this visual artist and muralist – cum curator and exhibition designer – expresses the full measure of his art.

Drawing on his vast knowledge of art history, Party weaves a singular and profound oeuvre that exalts pictorial conventions. Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe, Giorgio Morandi, Rosalba Carriera and Félix Vallotton, he revisits the classic codes of art, abandoning faithful representations of nature in favour of an original, phantasmagorical exploration of colour and shape. Moreover, he is one of the rare contemporary artists whose medium of choice is pastel.

Named after the iconic painting L’Heure mauve (Mauve Twilight) by Canadian Symbolist Ozias Leduc, found in the MMFA’s collection, the exhibition brings together watercolours, pastels and sculptures by Party, including about 20 works that have yet to be exhibited. The landscapes, portraits and still lifes, at once fantastical and subtle, illustrate the complex and often inextricable ties that bind humans to nature.

These creations combining figurative and Surrealist genres are set against some 50 works from the MMFA’s rich collection that span four centuries. Painstakingly chosen by Party, they range from paintings by such artists as Gustave Courbet, Otto Dix and Lawren S. Harris, to chairs by Wendell Castle and Shiro Kuramata. These works are integrated into temporary murals created in oil and pastel, covering 180 m2 of wall space in the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion in dense, rich colours. Some of the galleries have also been temporarily partitioned by walls pierced by grand archways, adding visual interest to the experience.

From one gallery to the next, Nicolas Party explores, through numerous representations in art, the many-faceted relationship humans have had with nature over the course of time: original sin, conquest, ruined landscape, sublime space, and as a place of desire, chaos, death and metamorphosis. At its heart, this exhibition delves into the big questions of our time, those regarding a planet that has reached its “mauve twilight.”

“At turns poetic and provocative, Nicolas Party’s exhibition is an invitation to dream and to re-imagine the terms of our relationship to nature. Setting masterpieces of the MMFA collection in conversation with his singularly fantastical creations, Party shows us that the past is deeply relevant to our present moment and that works of art have infinite stories to tell,” shares Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Chief Curator of the MMFA.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, Nicolas Party got his artistic start as a graffiti artist before pursuing a bachelor’s in Visual Arts from the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (2004) and a Master of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art (2009). His work has recently been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, including at the MASI Lugano (2020), the FLAG Art Foundation in New York (2019), the M WOODS Museum in Beijing (2018), the Musée Magritte in Brussels (2018) and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2017). He lives and works in Brussels and New York, where he has his studio.