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拍品专文
‘I like the idea of walking through a forest made up of every single tree ever painted by humans … It’s in that forest I walk to find inspiration’ (Nicolas Party)
A vivid hymn to nature, Tree Trunks is a spectacular example of Nicolas Party’s celebrated landscapes. Vibrant, sinuous bands of colour shoot up the length of the canvas, casting their shadows on the floor below. Rendered in the artist’s signature pastel, rich hues of red, orange, pink and green gleam brightly against the darkness, near-painterly in their intensity. Executed in 2015, Tree Trunks takes its place within one of Party’s most important bodies of work. Inspired by his childhood in Switzerland, he sees trees as fundamental to both art and life. In his hands they become vehicles for touring art history, evoking the legacies of Romanticism, European Modernism and twentieth-century abstraction. Radiant and alive, they inhabit surreal, timeless hinterlands, each glowing with hyperreal clarity. Held in the same private collection since its creation, the present work featured in Party’s exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in 2022, where his pastel landscapes hung in concert with works by Alberto Giacometti and Ferdinand Hodler.
It was Hodler, along with Félix Vallotton and Hans Emmenegger, who first inspired Party’s interest in landscape painting. He deeply admired their depictions of the dramatic Swiss vistas in which he had spent his youth. While his practice would go on to encompass portraiture and still life, themes of nature would become central to his oeuvre. ‘Trees might be the object most frequently painted to represent the natural world, an essential symbol in cultures around the world’, he explains. ‘Today the tree is still the fundamental symbol of the anxiety that we have about the future of our planet’. Party purposefully depicts ‘an environment that belongs either to a time before or long after humanity’, envisioning ‘a time when human culture doesn’t affect the landscape’ (N. Party, quoted in S. Aquin et al., Nicolas Party, London 2021, p. 26). The subject has given rise to some of his most ambitious projects, including large-scale murals for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Marciano Art Foundation, both drawing upon his roots as a graffiti artist.
For Party, trees are also intimately connected to the very act of image-making itself. ‘One of the first things that you draw as a child are trees’, he notes; ‘… Trees are nature’s alphabets’ (N. Party, quoted in statement for ‘Nicolas Party: Canopy’, online exhibition, Hauser & Wirth, 2020). He has also spoken of the inspiration he derives from walking through the ‘forests’ of art history, finding comfort in depicting something with such a rich visual and cultural lineage. The present work sparks memories of Monet’s poplars, Munch’s foreboding forests and Klimt’s sinuous birches; there are echoes of O’Keeffe, Van Gogh and Magritte. The lessons of abstraction—Newman, Kelly, Stella and others—lurk in the shadows. So, too, do the pastels of Picasso, which inspired Party to commit himself to the medium in 2013. Though no humans are present in the work, the spirits of these artists lingers in their place. The trees quiver with an almost anthropomorphic charge, their branches bathed in the light of the past.
A vivid hymn to nature, Tree Trunks is a spectacular example of Nicolas Party’s celebrated landscapes. Vibrant, sinuous bands of colour shoot up the length of the canvas, casting their shadows on the floor below. Rendered in the artist’s signature pastel, rich hues of red, orange, pink and green gleam brightly against the darkness, near-painterly in their intensity. Executed in 2015, Tree Trunks takes its place within one of Party’s most important bodies of work. Inspired by his childhood in Switzerland, he sees trees as fundamental to both art and life. In his hands they become vehicles for touring art history, evoking the legacies of Romanticism, European Modernism and twentieth-century abstraction. Radiant and alive, they inhabit surreal, timeless hinterlands, each glowing with hyperreal clarity. Held in the same private collection since its creation, the present work featured in Party’s exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in 2022, where his pastel landscapes hung in concert with works by Alberto Giacometti and Ferdinand Hodler.
It was Hodler, along with Félix Vallotton and Hans Emmenegger, who first inspired Party’s interest in landscape painting. He deeply admired their depictions of the dramatic Swiss vistas in which he had spent his youth. While his practice would go on to encompass portraiture and still life, themes of nature would become central to his oeuvre. ‘Trees might be the object most frequently painted to represent the natural world, an essential symbol in cultures around the world’, he explains. ‘Today the tree is still the fundamental symbol of the anxiety that we have about the future of our planet’. Party purposefully depicts ‘an environment that belongs either to a time before or long after humanity’, envisioning ‘a time when human culture doesn’t affect the landscape’ (N. Party, quoted in S. Aquin et al., Nicolas Party, London 2021, p. 26). The subject has given rise to some of his most ambitious projects, including large-scale murals for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Marciano Art Foundation, both drawing upon his roots as a graffiti artist.
For Party, trees are also intimately connected to the very act of image-making itself. ‘One of the first things that you draw as a child are trees’, he notes; ‘… Trees are nature’s alphabets’ (N. Party, quoted in statement for ‘Nicolas Party: Canopy’, online exhibition, Hauser & Wirth, 2020). He has also spoken of the inspiration he derives from walking through the ‘forests’ of art history, finding comfort in depicting something with such a rich visual and cultural lineage. The present work sparks memories of Monet’s poplars, Munch’s foreboding forests and Klimt’s sinuous birches; there are echoes of O’Keeffe, Van Gogh and Magritte. The lessons of abstraction—Newman, Kelly, Stella and others—lurk in the shadows. So, too, do the pastels of Picasso, which inspired Party to commit himself to the medium in 2013. Though no humans are present in the work, the spirits of these artists lingers in their place. The trees quiver with an almost anthropomorphic charge, their branches bathed in the light of the past.