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.