Born in Lausanne in 1980, Nicolas Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling 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.
21 September 2025 • Mark Westall
Featuring new treescapes and portraits in pastel, this exhibition celebrates and challenges longstanding
and cherished conventions of representational painting
17 June 2020 • Mark Westall
Opening Thursday 18th June, and curated by Lawrence Van Hagen, WHAT’S UP TWENTY TWENTY is an exhibition and art sale for our time, one that challenges the physical exhibition space as we know it and releases viewers from the confines of one gallery in one location.
24 April 2020 • Mark Westall
Second Smile looks at new tendencies in figuration with a surrealist bent. Including loans of classical surrealist works, the exhibition focuses on what parts of the surrealist project are compelling for artists today and in what ways these distinctions of movements are being dissolved.
20 August 2018 • Guest
Exclusive new FAD series: Christian Luiten, co-founder of amazing art platform @AvantArte chooses the artists you should be following this season. Read on for his Autumn 2018 picks.
24 September 2016 • Staff
For his second solo exhibition at The Modern Institute, Nicolas Party has transformed the Aird’s Lane space into an interior populated with temporary walls and murals meticulously rendered to resemble marble and malachite in the manner of trompe l’oeil. This scenery creates a faux-classical setting to present Party’s new body of pastels on canvas.
