MARCH 10, 2020
Photograph: Hauser & Wirth website
Nicolas Party Sottobosco
13 February – 12 April 2020
Public opening: Saturday 15 February, 3 – 7 pm
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles South Gallery
Los Angeles… Beginning 13 February 2020, Hauser & Wirth will debut ‘Sottobosco,’ the first LA solo exhibition
for critically admired NY-based Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Comprised of new paintings, sculptures, site-specific
murals, and an architectural installation, ‘Sottobosco’ conjures the shadowy world of the forest floor in a brilliant
pastel universe where subject, form, and time collapse in visual splendor.
Best known for his unique approach to landscapes, portraits, and still life scenes created in pastel, Party directs
his idiosyncratic choice of medium toward otherworldly depictions of objects both natural and manmade. With
the new works on view at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, he further explores this binary through what Italians call
sottobosco. This Italian word for the undergrowth of a forest also denotes the sub-genre of still life painting
devoted to botanical and zoological life in nature’s darker regions. Through his unique lens on universal forms,
Party detects surprising connections between seemingly disparate worlds – nature, science, the art historical
canon – and invites his viewer to consider alternate realities.
‘Sottobosco’ follows Party’s major mural commissions for the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA (2016) and the
Dallas Museum of Art (2016), and solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington
DC (2017) and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2019). In 2019, the artist was awarded the RxArt commission
to create a 207-foot-long mural for the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, scheduled for completion in 2020.
About the Exhibition
The sottobosco still life, made famous by Dutch artist Otto Marseus van Schrieck, is closely tied to scientific
developments of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age, when the invention of the microscope ignited a fascination
with all things miniscule. Influenced by the scientific zeitgeist, Marseus directed his gaze downward, toward the
often-overlooked forest floor up to eye level, capturing its dense universe with exacting detail. With the sottobosco,
Marseus abandoned the familiar comfort of a domestic setting and placed the viewer among a menagerie of
strange creatures and wild flora. In a latter-day parallel, Nicolas Party’s ‘Portrait with Mushrooms’ (2019) merges
his own figure with augmented mushrooms in rich, woody hues, reconsidering sottobosco in a contemporary
context.
Paintings and sculptures throughout this new series depict flora and fauna particularly associated with
processes of growth and metamorphosis, including butterflies, frogs, and flowers, to suggest themes of evolution
as they relate to Party’s own practice and reflections on human history. Alongside visual references to Marseus,
Party’s paintings also borrow unique aesthetic flourishes from such masters of the European floral still life as Rachel
Ruysch and Jan van Kessel, bringing a new vivacity to the historically significant sottobosco composition. Further,
the exhibition’s west and east ends are flanked by two site-specific murals rendered in the artist’s distinctive use
of pastel, which portray vibrant, monolithic caves, forging a link between the forest floor and another natural site
where little to no light reaches.
Exemplifying the artist’s interest in the interaction between art and architecture and creating an additional link to
17th century still life painting, the exhibition features a chapel-like structure that appears to be made of exotic
woods and marble through the masterful use of Trompe l’oeil, a technique commonly used in Renaissance fresco
that employs realistic imagery to produce optical illusions. Placed at the center of the exhibition, the ‘sottobosco
chapel’ houses Marseus’s original painting ‘Three Snakes, Lizards, and Toads’ (1663), a definitive example of
sottobosco, forming a direct connection to the style’s origin and Party’s modern-day reinterpretation of it. In
Party’s hands, Trompe l’oeil radiates from the architectural structure throughout the exhibition in a range of forms:
illusions of marble materialize on hand-painted archways and realistic insects appear in three dimensions on
painted sculptures, reinforcing a world where forms flicker between the known and reimagined.
About the Artist
Born in Lausanne in 1980, 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.
In addition to paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, installation works, and sculptures,
including painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome. His
brightly-colored androgynous figures vary in scale from the handheld to the monumental, and are displayed on
tromp l’oeil marble plinths of differing heights that upend conventional perspective. Party’s early interest in graffiti
and murals – his projects in this arena have included major commissions for the Dallas Museum of Art and the
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles – has led to a particular approach to the installation and presentation of his
work. He routinely deploys color and makes architectural interventions in exhibition spaces in order to construct
enveloping experiences for the viewer.
The artist’s childhood in Switzerland imprinted upon him an early 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. Points of reference in his work include celebrated 19th-century Swiss artists Félix Vallotton, Ferdinand
Hodler, and to Hans Emmenegger. One can also find within his works a 21st-century synthesis of the sorts of
impulses and ideas that fueled the Renaissance and late 19th-century, early 20th-century figurative painting, the
compositional strategies of Rosalba Carriera and Rachel Ruysch, and the visions of such self-taught artists as
Louis Eilshemius and Milton Avery.
Based in New York and Brussels, Party studied at the Lausanne School of Art in Switzerland before receiving his
MFA from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland.
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