Nicolas Party - Pastel

Brussels- and Brooklyn-based Swiss artist Nicolas Party (born 1980) creates soft pastel drawings of trees, fruit, humans and landscapes that integrate his appetite for art history in their use of adopted pictorial languages. Party's works are focused around four consistent visual "characters": trees, fruit, humans and landscapes, rarely commingled in the same composition. Inspiration for his bare trees comes from Milton Avery; his single-stroke ocean swells from Ferdinand Hodler are occasionally lit by Felix Vallotton sunsets; and the eerie stares of his androgynous figures echo the apocalyptic vacancy of Christian Schad. These colorful pictures incorporate disparate and contradictory elements that create a complex optical effect of instability. Nicolas Party: Pastel documents the artist's 2017 show at Karma, New York, for which he conceived a unique environment in which to present the pastels.