Painter Nicolas Party: Art Makes Us Be Human

Why It Matters

Party’s account reveals how routine, cultural background and material choices shape a contemporary painter’s distinctive aesthetic, informing how collectors, curators and critics interpret and value his work. Understanding this process clarifies why his landscapes resonate emotionally and commercially in today’s art market.

Summary

Painter Nicolas Party describes his studio practice as a disciplined pursuit of looseness: he uses books and music to quiet self-consciousness, relies on daily practice to make technique intuitive, and repeatedly steps back from works to make decisive compositional changes. Party emphasizes the primacy of vision over craft, accepting technical limits while using color—especially pastels—as an intuitive, sensory language. He traces his affinity for landscape to his Swiss upbringing, where mountains and cultural imagery shaped a sense of scale and existential connection that informs his motifs. Overall he frames painting as an ongoing conversation between hand, eye and environment rather than a formulaic skill set.

Original Description

”You want to create a painting that is much more interesting than yourself.”

We visited Swiss artist Nicolas Party in his New York studio and found a man who just loves to paint.

”Like musicians or dancers, painters are the loosest and the freest possible when they practice, practice, practice. Then you don't think about the process. I come here every day, and I paint for like six, seven hours and have been doing so for 30 years now.”

”I love working with color. Color is a very important part of my practice. I have all those different colors in my studio, and I have this constant conversation with them. Working with colors when you paint, this is like even the most extreme way of being completely intuitive.”

”At the end of the day, feelings are what drive humans to be humans. Without music, without storytelling, without books, dancing, art, we can't express those feelings, and it would probably be unbearable to live.”

Nicolas Party (b. 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland) works across a wide range of different media. Primarily known for his color-saturated paintings and murals, he also makes painted sculptures, pastels, installations, prints, and drawings, and works as a curator. Party often paints landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of everyday objects, stripping them of all extraneous detail. Rather than creating faithful depictions from nature, he uses these seemingly innocuous subjects as springboards for an exploration into the art of painting itself. His concerns lie, therefore, less in the accurate depiction of nature and more in its translation and transformation through color, materials, and composition. Painterly precision, a vibrant color palette, and a keen eye for composition coalesce into works that are accessible and seductive but, at the same time, continue a long-standing art-historical dialogue between observation and the imagination. Party is also interested in the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art. To this end, he regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his paintings.

Nicolas Party (b. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland) lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally including recent solo exhibitions at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NY, USA (2025); Holburne Museum, Bath, England, UK (2025); Hoam Museum of Art, Yongin, South Korea (2024); The Warehouse, Dallas, TX, USA (2024); The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023); The Frick Collection, New York (2023); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2023), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon (2021); MASI Lugano (2021); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2019); M WOODS, Beijing (2018-2019); and Magritte Museum, Brussels (2018).

Nicolas Party was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his studio in Brooklyn, New York. The conversation took place in March 2026.

Camera: Simon Weyhe

Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan

Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond.

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