Nicolas Party
Image 1: Art Viewer. 2018. ‘Nicolas Party at Galerie Gregor Staiger’. July 4. https://artviewer.org/nicolas-party-at-galerie-gregor-staiger/.
Image 2: Artmap.Com. 2017. ‘Nicolas Party at Modern Art Oxford Oxford - Artmap.Com’. https://artmap.com/modernartoxford/exhibition/nicolas-party-2017.
The work of Nicolas Party appear to reference classical Greek and Roman sculpture, but he changes them through uusual shapes, exaggerated proportions, and paints them in bright colours. They look familiar but also quite strange.
He combines painting with sculpture to create his busts, heads, and bodily forms. Colour looks to be important in his work as his sculptures are often displayed on brightly coloured plinths and within painted environments, so the sculpture doesn't feel separated from the space around it. It all becomes part of the same environment.
What I find particularly interesting is that the plinth becomes just as important as the head itself. Rather than being a neutral support, it becomes part of the visual language of the sculpture. Some of the plinths are exaggerated in proportions; too tall, too wide, so they start to feel more like a body connected to the head rather than something holding the head up. The heads are also interesting to look at because they are very simplified. They dont look like realistic portraits, but instead look like blank forms or mannequins with a face painted onto the surface. They are a three-dimensional surface for drawing and painting, making me think about the relationship between physical structure and the image placed onto it.
