Nicolas Party: Dust

Hoam Museum of Art presents Dust, the largest survey exhibition of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s oeuvre to date. Showcasing 48 of the artist's existing paintings and sculptures and 20 new paintings, the exhibition also includes five large scale pastel murals created especially for the occasion, alongside key works from the Leeum Museum of Art’s collection of traditional art and antiquities. Immersing himself in the world of graffiti since his childhood, and studying film, graphic design, and 3D animation in college, Party even once formed an artist collective that organized exhibitions and engagements fusing art, music and performance. Though the majority of his work has centered around painting since then, his multidisciplinary background informs his practice overall, ranging from murals, painted sculptures, total installations to exhibition curation. 

For Nicolas Party, art history is both an archive and a precious treasure trove of inspiration. Freely referencing a wide spectrum of artists, motifs, styles, and materials that span ancient to modern and contemporary art history, the artist creates a breadth of images that are distinctly unique. Particularly noteworthy is Party’s use of pastels, a medium largely forgotten since the 18th century, the last period in which it enjoyed relative popularity in Europe. Summoning this forgotten medium, the artist uses it to reinterpret traditional genres of painting, such as landscape, still life, and portraiture. Combined with saturated colors, simple forms, and uncanny imagery, his works feel friendly yet impenetrable, pivoting between lightness and profundity, as well as humor and gravitas.

The exhibition's title, Dust, speaks to a key element of Party’s practice: namely, embracing those characteristics inherent to pastels as both the primary means and subject of his painterly representation. Easily dispersed into surrounding air like “dust from a butterfly's wings,” pastel is a material that is intrinsically fragile and ephemeral. Party refers to pastel paintings as a “mask of dust” akin to the powdery illusion of makeup. His expansive site-specific pastel murals, painted directly onto the walls of the museum, exist only for the duration of the exhibition, destined to disappear. Taking this ontological precarity of the medium, the artist expands it into a reflection on the sustainability and extinction of human and non-human species, civilization and nature. 

For this exhibition, Party references and presents traditional works from the collection of Leeum Museum of Art, juxtaposing his own work to spark dialogues that cross boundaries of culture and time. In particular, he has created eight new portraits of imaginary immortals by sampling the wealth of symbolic imagery found in Ten Longevity Symbols and Daoist Immortals by Kim Hong-Do, two classic masterpieces from 18th century Joseon Dynasty that delve into the human desire for longevity and immortality. The artist also interweaves cultural symbols and representations that span the ages across both East and West, including a white porcelain placenta jar in front of a majestic cave; humans merged with flowers, mushrooms and meteorites; extinct dinosaurs with imaginary dragons; and a red forest with ashen clouds, creating points of intersection between the romantic concept of the sublime and apocalyptic disaster. The artist thereby makes us contemplate the evolving relationship between humans and nature in the history of representation, and the vast flow of time that surpasses the finiteness of species.

Structuring the first and second floor galleries of Hoam to be identical, the artist creates a maze of narrow corridors and spacious rooms, utilizing arched doorways and faux marble—recurring motifs in medieval architecture and painting—to scaffold a unique architectural experience that connects each room to the next. Moreover, he refreshes the space with murals on the landing of the main lobby staircase and the walls of the galleries, sometimes “collaging” his other works against them, and at other times juxtaposing them with traditional works of art. The exhibition, in turn, becomes a lattice of meticulous composition and playful improvisation, presenting itself as both an artwork in its own right and a total, immersive environment that transforms our understanding and experience of space and exhibitions.

Curated by June Young Kwak, Head of Exhibitions, Leeum/Hoam Museum of Art and Heyeon Kim, Curator, Leeum/Hoam Museum of Art.

Press contact: Hyunjoo Choi, Communication Team, T +82 2 2014 6556 / hyunjoo.choi@samsung.com