Nicolas Party
Soft pastel portraits and landscapes in colours that belong to no weather on earth.
Nicolas Party was born in Lausanne in 1980, came out of graffiti and studied film and fine art in Lausanne and Glasgow. He works principally in soft pastel — an unfashionable and technically demanding medium — making portraits, still lifes, trees and mountain landscapes in flat, saturated, artificial colour, with faces reduced to smooth ovals and shadows that behave impossibly. He also paints large murals directly onto gallery walls, which are destroyed at the end of every exhibition, and has installed work in dialogue with historical collections.
Soft pastel governs everything practical. The pigment sits on the surface unbound, is not fixed, and will smudge or shed from a knock, from vibration in transit or from static against glass, and it cannot be cleaned or retouched; works must be glazed, spaced from the glass and never travelled casually. Condition therefore dominates value here more than for almost any other contemporary artist. Pastels on linen and on canvas lead the market. Oils exist but are fewer. Prints and editions are relatively scarce and are the accessible end.
If you own a work by Nicolas Party
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.