Artist Nicolas Party pays homage to Rococo pastels in Frick Madison exhibition in New York

Frick Madison, the temporary venue of The Frick Collection, is home to a newly commissioned mural by Nicolas Party.

The Swiss artist, who lives in Brooklyn, has a three-wall vignette on display at the Breuer Building in Manhattan, New York – which Sotheby's recently purchased from the Whitney Museum for a reported $100 million. The works, an homage to 18th century Italian painter Rosalba Carriera, will remain on view until the Old Masters institution leaves the Brutalist building on March 3.

Two new portraits by Party – which offer a contemporary take on the classic Rococo – bookend Carriera’s portrait of an anonymous man in pilgrim costume, perhaps painted during a Venice carnival in the 1730s. The estimated decade coincides with the period when the Venetian portraitist was at the height of her career, not unlike Party who is today among the most sought-after artists and one of the youngest names represented by the Swiss mega gallery Hauser & Wirth.

The artist recently staged solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and Switzerland’s Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, with his paintings fetching as high as $6.6 million at auction.

A pillar of pastel painting from the flamboyant Rococo era, Carriera's work is also the utmost inspiration for Party who filters the traditional powdery material through a contemporary lens focused on identity and impermanence.

The show emerged from a visit that The Frick Collection’s deputy director Xavier Salomon paid to Party’s Red Hook studio to view two Carriera paintings the artist owns.

Salomon discovered that Carriera had hidden woodcut charms behind many of her paintings when the Frick received two in 2020 – a gift from the late Vendome Press founder Alexis Gregory.

Carriera had amassed a large number of patrons from Great Britain and France, and she added these secret prayers to protect the portraits during shipment overseas.

The fascination took the curator across the globe in search of these charms behind her painting, including Party’s. “There was nothing behind the first, but we actually found the woodcut charm behind my second Rosalba,” Party tells The National. “Xavier and I found a common ground in our passion and interest in her pastel universe.”

The conversation between the two eventually led to the installation, which also features pastel murals Party painted onto the three walls where the works are separately hung. Boldly coloured, the trompe-l’oeil murals are blown up details from paintings by Carriera’s contemporaries, Jean-Etienne Liotard and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour.

Two walls hold curtains adorned with floral motifs with dramatically dancing folds, while a modest white cloth drapes coyly – and with a dose of eerie – on the third wall.

“All of our contemporary installations at Frick Madison are designed to interact with Old Masters,” Salomon says. The museum’s previous contemporary presentation was Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, which featured four new-generation figurative painters who live and work in New York, including Salman Toor and Toyin Ojih Odutola. “We are an institution that displays European art from 1300 to 1900, and we are interested in showing how influential and relevant this art is for today's artists,” Salomon adds.

Party is indeed an ideal artist to accompany the uptown museum’s lauded collection, which spans not only works of traditional European fine art but also decorative objects in various materials. A similar declaration of visual exuberance speaks for both joy and ennui in Party’s pictorial universe.

Self-exploration, psychological multitudes, and a quest into the subconsciousness are gently veiled by old-worldy indulgence and escapism in his paintings and sculptures, which borrow aesthetic and thematic cues from eras heavily represented in The Frick’s holdings.

Unsurprisingly, the museum has been a temple for Party, 42, since he moved to New York seven years ago. “A real tournament,” he calls the experience of visiting the 88-year-old museum’s original location, which reopens next year after a $160 million expansion by architect Annabelle Selldorf.

Usually, he says, “If you’re looking to see Rembrandt, Vermeer or Fragonard, you will only see the top-quality work by them in the setting of a home rather than a massive museum atmosphere like the Louvre or The Met." This highlights why Louvre Abu Dhabi's recent acquisition of 18th-century painter Fragonard's Les Marionnettes is so significant.

The priceless aspect of the project for Party was getting his hands dirty with pastel inside the ultra-modernist building. Marcel Breuer designed the seven-floor structure in 1964 to house The Whitney Museum of American Art, which called it home for five decades until moving downtown.

After dabbling with graffiti as a teenager in Lausanne and having worked with pastel murals for a decade, Party cherished the opportunity to apply his favorite material on to the walls nearby Agnolo Bronzino’s depiction of Lodovico Capponi or a Giovanni Battista Moroni painting, which is believed to be one of the first Renaissance era portraits of a woman.

Hung at the adjacent gallery is a portrait of a woman sitter, which features several key elements of a Carriera: a dazzling costume, a powdery palette, a set of direct but mellow eyes, and a performative posture.

When Party was invited to curate a contemporary pastel exhibition at New York's Flag Art Foundation alongside his own murals in 2019, he looked no further than Jean-Honore Fragonard’s The Progress of Love (1771-1773) from the Frick's collection to act as the backdrop to his own Carriera painting on the wall. “I reproduced the top half of the trees in three of the painting’s four panels on to the walls,” he says about meticulously recreating the romantic scenery’s detail.

As much as the material, the colours particularly resonated with Party while he was working inside the Frick. The mural’s pitch-black shade was invented 10 years ago by Isabelle Roche who runs her grandfather’s Parisian paint company La Maison du Pastel. “He was a pharmacist who in the late 19th century bought a hundred-year-old pastel company, which is where Rosalba [Carriera] bought her materials,” Party says.

Besides the mural's densely populated velvety black tone, the nocturnal blue that Party used to colour the face in one of his two portraits echos with a libertarian approach to embodying figuration. “My characters don't have direct connection to any sitter and they rather only live on the canvas,” he says. “I still want them to look like humans but maybe with a little bit of make-up.”

Given Rococo’s fascination with beautification and fashion, this homage helps the artist to create an emotional bridge with the viewer without the complexity of capturing a specific poser. “When you look at a Mary Cassatt or Rembrandt, we mostly don’t know who the person is and feel touched by the painting itself,” Party says. “The man in Rosalba’s painting in this show has an emotional resonance and visible energy although we don’t know his identity – similarly, I want the viewers to be able to create their own stories about my paintings’ characters.”