In conjunction with Frieze Los Angeles 2020, Hauser & Wirth will debut the first LA solo exhibition of critically admired NY-based Swiss artist Nicolas Party. The Neoclassical South Gallery will be transformed into a universe of brilliant hues and surreal personae in an enveloping, site-specific environment including a monumental installation, murals, and sculpture. This exhibition follows Party’s prior mural projects in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum (2016) and in New York at The FLAG Art Foundation (2019).
Party is best known for his bold and otherworldly landscapes, portraits, and still life scenes created in pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium that allows for a more direct material engagement and fluidity of production that have come to characterize his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Party eschews direct influence from any established art movements, but instead borrows and reinterprets touchpoints as far-flung as Symbolism, Surrealism, and The New York School. He also draws from the compositional tactics of Rene Magritte and Giorgio Morandi, and the practices of self-taught artists Louis Eilshemius and Milton Avery. His childhood in Switzerland engendered a 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, with points of reference in his work to celebrated 19th-century Swiss artists Félix Vallotton, Ferdinand Hodler, and to the figurative watercolor painter, Rudolf Stüssi. Through his unique culling and colorful reworking of disparate sources, Party transfigures quotidian objects and the natural world into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, suggesting deeper connections and meanings.
