Nicolas Party : Rovine

The first substantial monograph on Nicolas Party, a leading representative of Swiss and international contemporary art.

This book offers the first-ever survey of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s entire body of work. Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Party now lives and works in New York and has established himself as one of the most important figures of international contemporary art.

Nicolas Party—Rovine (Italian for ruins) features pastels and sculptures that Party has created since 2013, many of which are previously unpublished. The book focuses on the core genres of painting: still life, landscape, and portrait. Party’s works stand out in these genres due to his use of wild, anti-naturalistic colors, as well as through his extremely precise rendering of the subjects. The artist explains his fascination for each of these genres in accompanying texts. The book also shows a large-format wall painting and a sculpture created especially for Party’s major solo exhibition at MASI Lugano in the summer of 2021. Contributions by the art critic and curator Michele Robecchi and by MASI Lugano’s director Tobia Bezzola complete this beautiful volume.

Francesca Bernasconi is an art historian and head of the exhibition office at MASI Lugano since 2017.