Nicolas Party

Nicolas Party was born in 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland, and trained first at the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL), where he received a BFA in 2004, before completing an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2009. He is currently based in New York and Brussels. His practice spans painting, pastel, sculpture, and large-scale installation, drawing on a visual language that fuses art-historical precedent with an uncanny, colour-saturated sensibility rooted in landscape, portraiture, and still life.

Party's early mural work in Glasgow — including Landscape (2013), a public commission that marks a pivotal moment in his development — laid the groundwork for a mature practice in which the boundary between image and architecture is persistently tested. That ambition reached a civic scale with Draw the Curtain (2021), a monumental painted installation covering the exterior scaffolding of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., transforming the building's surface into an immersive image field. The Hirshhorn had already hosted a solo presentation in 2017, and the institution holds his work in its permanent collection, as do the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles and M WOODS in Beijing. A 2018 exhibition at the Magritte Museum in Brussels, Three Seasons, placed his paintings, pastels, and sculptures in direct dialogue with Surrealism, illuminating the dreamlike spatial logic and transformed scale that run throughout his work. L'heure mauve (2022) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts extended this synthesis further, weaving together painting, pastel, sculpture, and atmospheric installation into a single immersive environment. That same year, Red Forest opened at Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong.

Party is represented by Hauser & Wirth, Karma, Xavier Hufkens, Kaufmann Repetto, The Modern Institute, and Galerie Gregor Staiger — a network of galleries across London, New York, Brussels, Milan, Glasgow, and Zurich through which his exhibition programme has remained consistently active. Recent and forthcoming projects reflect undiminished momentum: Sottobosco at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2020); Rovine at MASI, Lugano (2021); Cascade at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2023); Dead Fish at Karma, New York (2025); Tribute to a Lake at Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2025); and Copper & Dust at the Holburne Museum, Bath (2025), which foregrounded his engagement with oil-on-copper as a historically charged painting support. Clotho (2025), a solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, London, running from 14 October to 20 December 2025, brought mythological reference, theatrical display, and immersive sculpture together in one of his most ambitious gallery presentations to date. A publication connected with his work appeared through Phaidon and Artspace in 2025, and a further solo exhibition, Toile d'araignée, is scheduled at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, in 2026.