From graffiti on trains to the global art scene: Nicolas Party’s pastel revolution

Nicolas Party at his recent exhibition, "Toile d'Aragneés" (Spiderweb), at the Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels. Hugard & Vanoverschelde

Swiss artist Nicolas Party has seen his work featured in major exhibitions across three continents this year. In an interview with Swissinfo, he explains why he abandoned oil paints, how a chance encounter with Picasso transformed his approach, and why working directly with pastels on walls became his signature technique. 

Party has earned an international reputation for a visual language that is instantly recognisable: bold colours, simplified forms, and compositions that carry the clarity of graphic symbols. He is also known for transforming exhibition spaces through immersive wall paintings and site-specific interventions, turning the surrounding architecture into a temporary artwork.  

Beneath that visual immediacy lies a deep engagement with art history. His work carries influences from artists across centuries, from Rembrandt to Picasso, and with movements ranging from Symbolism to Surrealism. 

“Draw the Curtain”, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2021–22. A monumental image by Party covered the scaffolding surrounding the museum during its renovation, extending the exhibition beyond the institution’s walls and into the city itself.  Ron Blunt

Party, 45, speaks to Swissinfo on a video call from his studio in Red Hook, a narrow stretch of Brooklyn that he says feels almost like a seaside town. He turns the camera toward the window. Beyond it, downtown Brooklyn rises in a cluster of glass towers. “It looks a lot like Lord of the Rings,” he says, laughing. “Saruman’s tower.” 

This year alone, he has already had three major exhibitions: Dead Fish at Karma Gallery in New York, Toile d’araignée at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, and a presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026, alongside a retrospective book, Murals, which brings together his exhibitions since 2011.

His pastel room is, by his own admission, extremely dusty. Behind him stands a custom-made wooden cabinet with narrow slots containing every colour of pastel imaginable. Pastel, which Party has made entirely his own, is essentially pure pigment compressed into sticks. Applied to walls prepared with a gritty surface, it occupies a space somewhere between chalk and fresco. 

Instantly recognisable as Party’s work, frames are placed against walls entirely covered by his murals, turning the exhibition architecture itself into a temporary artwork. Detail of the exhibition “Pastel et nu”, Centre culturel suisse, Paris, 2015. Marc Domage

Pastel, pace and progress 

Party studied at the University of Art and Design Lausanne before moving to Glasgow, where he lived for six years. There, he mainly worked in oil painting, but increasingly found himself caught between two conflicting rhythms. Oil painting was slow work: layering, drying, constant revision. 

“I was making maybe three paintings a year because I kept reworking them,” he says. “I liked the paintings once they were finished, but I wasn’t happy with the process. I felt I couldn’t work quickly enough to really make progress.” At the same time, he was being invited to create murals directly onto gallery walls using spray paint and charcoal. Those works were provisional, physical, and immediate. The temporary installations became an important counterweight to the painstaking pace of the studio. 

Early wall works made with charcoal applied directly over spray paint, reflecting the immediacy and physicality that would later shape Party’s pastel installations. Detail of the exhibition “Still Life, Stones, and Elephants”, Swiss Institute, New York, 2012. Daniel Pérez

The turning point came unexpectedly at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, where Party encountered Tête de femme (1921), a pastel portrait from Picasso’s post-Cubist period. “Something just clicked,” Party recalls. “I remember thinking: this is exactly what I want to do.” The following day, he bought pastel sticks, paper, and a postcard reproduction of the Picasso work. 

Part of the attraction lay in the medium’s limitations. Unlike oil painting, pastel cannot easily be corrected. It demands directness. “It restrained the possibilities and, paradoxically, it freed me,” he says. “Suddenly I could produce much more work. And when you produce more, you progress faster because you see more failures and more successes. You experiment more.” Pastel accelerated not only his output, but also his way of thinking. 

Tête de femme, pastel on paper, 1921, by Pablo Picasso. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The shift toward what is now recognised as Party’s signature technique, applying pastel directly onto walls, happened almost accidentally. While preparing an installation for the Hammer Museum in 2016, a curator casually suggested replacing charcoal with pastel. Party initially thought the idea was technically impossible, but his curiosity was piqued. The result transformed his practice. 

Enlarged to mural scale, pastel behaved unlike any conventional painting medium. “The pigments and texture are so unusual at that scale,” Party explains. “It’s basically pure dust and pigment directly on the wall. And the process is extremely fast. With paint, you constantly dip brushes, mix colours, climb up and down ladders, worry about drips. With pastel, you just hold sticks in your hands.”

Party’s first experiment applying pastel directly onto walls, marking the beginning of the immersive mural installations that became central to his practice.  Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2016–17. Brian Forrest

Conventional subjects 

Party works within a deliberately narrow set of subjects: portrait, landscape, and still life. These are, as he readily acknowledges, the most conventional motifs in Western painting. The conventionality is precisely what interests him. The restriction became a form of freedom. Like Josef Albers returning to the square or Giorgio Morandi to his bottles, Party uses repetition as a method of deep looking. Among these recurring motifs, trees have taken on a near-devotional role.  

“For me, landscapes, portraits, flowers, trees – these became my language,” he says. “And over time I slowly add new ‘families’ of subjects. Recently I’ve been working on dead fish, for example. But I try not to introduce too many things too quickly. You need time to understand why a subject matters to you.”

Exhibition: “Dead Fish”, Karma Gallery (New York), 2026. Iain McDonald

Many of his exhibitions are shaped by encounters with historical figures, either through direct reference, juxtaposition, or reinterpretation. From Rosalba Carriera to Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Party uses historical works as starting points for his own investigations, allowing past and present to coexist within a single visual language. 

For him, referencing another artist’s work is not quotation but prolonged attention. “For me, copying becomes a way of creating intimacy with an artwork. Today we consume images so quickly. You look at something online for three seconds and move on. But when you draw or paint something, you’re forced to spend real time with it. It becomes imprinted in your mind.”

For the show entitled “Clotho” (Hauser & Wirth, London, 2025), Nicolas Party looked closely at late 19th-century sculpture, particularly the work of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. Above: “Portrait with Camille”, 2025. Adam Reich

“Portrait with Auguste”, 2025. Soft pastel on linen. Adam Reich

A Swiss visual heritage

The most recognisable elements of Party’s work – the saturated palette, the flattened forms, the iconic faces – can be traced back to his artistic start in street art and graffiti. From the age of 12 until his early 20s, he spent his adolescence tagging graffiti on trains and walls across Lausanne, Geneva, and beyond.

It was an education in immediacy: how colour operates in public space, how an image needs to register instantly. “The main thing has to be visible from far away,” he explains. “It’s a little bit like logos. You need a graphic language and bright colours that make the imagery recognisable very quickly.” 

Combining Party’s paintings, sculptures, and five site-specific murals with works from the museum’s own collection, the 2022 exhibition “L’Heure Mauve” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts transformed the galleries into an immersive dialogue between contemporary and historical art. Jean-François Brière

Party refers to the ideas of Michel Pastoureau, the French medievalist and cultural historian whose writings on colour explore how visual systems shape collective perception. Pastoureau observed that Swiss children grow up surrounded by heraldry: cantonal flags, shields, coats of arms. Without fully realising it, they absorb a visual culture built on clarity and symbolism. 

This inheritance of heraldic Switzerland that filtered through years of street art helps explain the peculiar tension inside Party’s paintings. His portraits are frontal and expressionless, almost icon-like. The images feel designed to be read quickly. 

Staying curious  

Party’s desire to stay curious and to keep learning has led him to expand his visual references far beyond the strictly Western canon, particularly through projects in places such as Beijing and Seoul. While preparing for his exhibition Dust in Seoul, he immersed himself in the museum’s collection alongside the curators. “I learned a huge amount,” he says, “especially about Korean ceramics, which have an extraordinary history and material culture.” 

He would love to work in Istanbul and Egypt. “Honestly, you would need ten lifetimes to explore all of these cultures properly,” he says. “Any time you receive an invitation to somewhere you’ve never been, somewhere you know will completely expand your understanding, that’s always the best feeling.”

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Arcs are a central architectural theme in his work, often appearing as prominent features rendered in multiple colours. Exhibition: “Arches”, M Woods, Beijing, 2018–19. Mbam

View of the exhibition “Dust”, Hoam Museum of Art, South Korea, 2024–25. Each room formed its own symbolic atmosphere, with paintings featuring motifs of longevity such as cranes, peaches, waterfalls, mushrooms, and deer. Toward the end of the installation, Party added small guardian sculptures that traditionally stand outside tombs. “They weren’t considered precious objects in the same way as the national treasures, but they brought an important energy into the exhibition.” The mountain murals created multiple layers of connection, painted with fog and mist inspired by East Asian visual traditions, and felt particularly resonant given his origins in the Alps.  Sangtae Kim

Installation view of Nicolas Party’s grotto at the exhibition “Stage Fright”, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2021). Raimund Zakowski

Exhibition: “Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera”, The Frick Collection, New York, 2023–24. This shown examined the legacy of Rosalba Carriera through contemporary pastel portraits and textile-inspired murals, exploring how fashion and material culture construct identity across time. A pastel by Carriera was hung in between two of Party’s pastels. His murals are of the textiles featured in the work of Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Jean Étienne Liotard.   Joseph Coscia Jr.

“Spider Web”, 2026, artwork that lends its name to Party’s current exhibition at gallery Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. Hasselblad H6D

An exhibition exploring pastel as both medium and history, bringing together works spanning centuries, from 18th-century masters such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau to Edgar Degas, alongside Party’s own works.  Exhibition: “Pastel”, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, 2019. Steven Probert

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Edited by Catherine Hickley & Eduardo Simantob/ds