Title: Trees, 2019 Artist: Nicolas Party
Title: Trees, 2019
Artist: Nicolas Party
Gallery: Hauser & Wirth
Materials used: Soft pastel on linen
75 × 64 9/10 × 1 in
190.5 × 164.8 × 2.5 cm
Nicolas Party’s trees make me want to eat them. There is something of a gummy candy about those rounded green crowns against the pink background. I think about Haribo, although these would be a considerably more expensive habit.
Trees, made this year, sold through Hauser & Wirth for a reported $385,000 at Art Basel Miami Beach. The gallery announced its representation of Party in June, joining a network that includes Xavier Hufkens, Karma and The Modern Institute. This was a new relationship with a major gallery, rather than a new artist suddenly discovered in Miami.
The material makes the work even more appealing to me. Party works primarily in soft pastel, giving the color a matte, powdery surface. The trees are simplified into rounded shapes, with dark trunks interrupting all that green. They seem almost assembled rather than grown. You know what you are looking at, but nothing quite belongs to an actual landscape.
There is also considerably more history behind his choice of pastel than this picture might suggest. In New York, Party has organized Pastel at The FLAG Art Foundation, bringing together works by artists including Rosalba Carriera, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Four of his own Rococo inspired murals occupy the walls around them. He has given himself the freedom to select the art and change the room in which you encounter it.
Carriera was the impetus for the exhibition. The Venetian artist’s pastel portraits attracted European aristocrats and Grand Tour travelers in the eighteenth century. Her international success makes an interesting reference for an artist whose own pastels are now circulating through major galleries and international fairs. The appetite for the material has some distinguished precedents.
Party’s interest in the room extends beyond this exhibition. Murals and architectural interventions are part of his practice, with color carrying across walls and surrounding individual works. Looking at Trees on its own gives you one part of that practice. His exhibitions allow him to arrange a much larger scene.
The $385,000 is a reported gallery sale, rather than an auction result. It gives us a specific figure for this work at this fair, with Hauser & Wirth behind the transaction. It does not establish what every comparable Party will sell for, however tempting it is to turn a fair report into a price list. news.artnet.com
Pastel remains at FLAG through February 15, 2020. If you are passing through New York, it offers a chance to see Party’s work alongside the artists he has chosen himself. I would like to spend more time with that connection to Carriera. For now, I am still looking at these trees and thinking about candy.