Nicolas Party

Challenging the boundaries of traditional painting with his familiar yet unsettling portraits, landscapes and still lifes, the celebrated Swiss painter, sculptor and installation artist Nicolas Party is one of very few 21st-century creatives to have made their name painting with pastels.

Reducing familiar subjects to a few essential lines, his works are defined by their flat, reductive aesthetic, colour-saturated palette, skewed perspectives and mix of fantastical and everyday elements, drawing liberal inspiration from art-historical styles and oeuvres as diverse as Pop Art, Surrealism and Fauvism. “We're so used to seeing computer-generated images now that it has a big impact on how we see all images. I think this describes the look my figures have,” he says.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, and based in New York City today, the artist was part of the Swiss graffiti scene of the 1990s, while studying at the Lausanne School of Art. Upon graduating, he worked as a 3D animator, before moving to Scotland to study for his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art.

Citing Alex Katz and Hans Emmenegger as key Contemporary influences, Party works across a range of different media, including painting, sculpture, installation, print and drawing.