NICOLAS PARTY

WHEN TOMORROW COMES
04 NOVEMBER 2023

18 FEBRUARY 2024
 

Nicolas Party’s exhibition at the Museum Frieder Burda is the Swiss artist’s first museum presentation in Germany. Party has transformed the entire ensemble of rooms in Richard Meier’s distinctive building, located in the middle of a park landscape, into a conceptionally planned painting universe that visitors can enter. Impressive groups of luminous pastels as large murals, and small oil paintings on copper intervene in the museum’s architectural spaces, creating an exceptionally magical power of attraction.

The artist, who was born in 1980, is known for conceiving his exhibitions as large-scale immersive stages in which the palette of his works, which are filled with art-historical and stylistic references, spill over onto the white walls of the exhibition space. This makes the visitor’s yearning for white walls, after being moved by the sensuousness of art, strikingly apparent.

Murals painted directly on the wall show cascades of a waterfall, a burning forest, airy cloud formations and mountain panoramas, or a landscape with ruins. They contrast with meticulously painted, mysterious portraits of women with flowers, still lifes of unidentified fruits or vegetables, and miniature paintings depicting dinosaurs, an expression of the artist's recent fascination with prehistoric creatures.

The extensive exhibition in Baden-Baden enables visitors to immerse themselves in the artist’s unique practice and his visual meditations on the relationship between nature and humans as well as on the course of time in the world. Party’s singular visual language and subversive style allow him to condense his images into a fantastical and future-oriented cosmos of images that seems particularly topical today.

The artist once said, “It’s interesting for me to think about the apocalypse and art history, of Sodom and Gomorrah, and other historical paintings of fires that represent the end of the world. We believe, and we feel, that we are at the end of our human path as global warming brings us to ecological crisis, but this feeling has been almost a constant, from Noah’s Ark and various apocalyptic tales in the Bible to the nuclear bombings of World War II.”

To cite a saying, “It could have all happened another way.” Nicolas Party’s exhibition, which was curated by Udo Kittelmann, transfers this realization into a hypothetical tomorrow – one that is full of hope.


Nicolas Party (*1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland) lives and works in New York. He is represented in numerous prestigious collections and has had major solo museum exhibitions in the US, Europe and Asia.

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Audioguide

For the exhibition by artist Nicolas Party, a trilingual audio guide was designed that accompanies visitors on their journey of discovery through the Swiss artist’s colorful universe. Original voices of the curator and the artist in the audio guide additionally emphasize the fundamental challenges facing humanity, but also leave room for a hopeful future, as suggested by the title of the exhibition: "When tomorrow comes". Listen to 3 of the 19 contributions here!
CONTEXT WORKING METHOD
By linking space and image, Party demonstrates the significance of the architectural and institutional context for the viewing of images.
DINOSAURS (OIL/COPPER)
It is the story of a massive geological change, a succession of natural disasters that fundamentally altered the Earth‘s climate...
STILL-LIFE (MURAL)
"...these apples and pears, anxiously crowding together, have their youth behind them."

impressions

Exhibition Film


Exhibition Film


Podcast

The audio guide of the Transformers show delves into the experimental and animated nature of this radical exhibition. In four in-depth conversations, exhibition curator Udo Kittelmann investigates aspects and issues regarding artificial intelligence. These stimulating and inspiring conversations explore often surprising thoughts on “what if” scenarios in a radically changed future.
Louisa Clement (b. 1987 in Bonn, Germany) graduated from Düsseldorf art academy in 2015. Will machines become our doppelgangers? In this conversation, Udo Kittelmann and Louisa Clement speak about digital footprints, adaptive AI, digital networks, and isolation, sharing thoughts equally intriguing and disconcerting about three-dimensional likenesses.
Annemie Vanackere is a Belgian festival curator and theater director. Since 2012 she has been the director and CEO of the theater Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin. In addition to discussing the impact that the technologization and digitization of our lives has on the performing arts, Kittelmann and Vanackere talk about multiple intelligences and empathy.
Dr. Clara Meister is an international curator. Her curatorial work focuses on topics of translation, language, and music. In this conversation, Udo Kittelmann and Clara Meister explore the relationship between technology and nature, questioning technological progress and advocating more space for plant and other nonhuman intelligences in handling technological progress.
“Why are humans not content with themselves?” Alice Lagaay is a philosopher who is actively involved in developing performance as an interdisciplinary field of research. In this conversation on Jordan Wolfson’s animatronic sculpture Female Figure, Kittelmann and Lagaay discuss issues such as technological self-manipulation, the alluring and overwhelming qualities of machines, and the misogynistic aspects of the work.



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