Nicolas Party (born 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland) spent his teenage years deep in the city's graffiti scene, tagging trains and painting murals under cover of night for nearly a decade before formal training. "It's fun, but spending nights in jail gets old," he later said of the period — an early, unglamorous education in scale, surface, and working fast in public space that never really left his practice. He studied at the Lausanne School of Art before completing an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2009.

In Brussels, where he settled after Glasgow, Party began seriously researching the history of pastel — a medium he found nearly unchanged since the eighteenth century, associated above all with Rococo specialists like Rosalba Carriera. He made it entirely his own: soft pastel applied directly with his fingertips, blended and carved without the mixing oil paint requires, producing surfaces of unusually intense, immediate saturation. Alongside Carriera, he cites the Swiss landscape tradition of Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton, the still-life austerity of Giorgio Morandi, and the deadpan strangeness of René Magritte as recurring reference points — art history reworked through a distinctly contemporary, almost digital-flat colour sense.

His 2017 solo debut at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, Three Seasons, led directly to one of the defining moments of his career: a 2018 exhibition at Brussels's Magritte Museum, placing his work in direct dialogue with the Surrealist master he had long cited as an influence. Hauser & Wirth began representing him in 2019, the same year his major installation Pastel opened at New York's FLAG Art Foundation. Party now works across painting, pastel, sculpture, and site-specific mural, frequently transforming entire exhibition spaces into immersive, saturated environments — a direct inheritance, by his own account, from the graffiti instinct to treat architecture itself as a canvas. He divides his time between New York and Brussels.

Blue Sunset (2018), Party's auction record at $6.67 million (Christie's Hong Kong, 2022), exemplifies his saturated landscape mode — a pastel sky rendered in colours pushed just past naturalism, characteristic of the sunsets and mountain ranges that established his market.

Stage Fright (2021), his major exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, transformed the museum's domed hall into an immersive green grotto mural while debuting a new nine-portrait series of Marlene Dietrich — its title borrowed from Hitchcock's 1950 film of the same name. Portrait with Iceberg, from the same series, directly appropriates Caspar David Friedrich's The Sea of Ice (1823), folding German Romanticism into his own art-historical vocabulary.

His Still Life series, built around bulbous fruit and everyday objects rendered with an uncanny, slightly inflated strangeness, has become one of his most consistently collected motifs — multiple works from the series rank among his highest auction results.

Party's editions translate his pastel-driven practice into printmaking processes including woodcut, offset lithography, and screenprint, carrying the same saturated colour and stylised, gently unsettling figuration as his paintings. Portrait with Shells and Portrait of a Seahorse Necklace extend his recurring interest in ornamented, masked portraiture — figures adorned with natural forms that blur the line between decoration and disguise.

Because Party's major paintings now regularly exceed seven figures at auction, and his works on paper alone have averaged over $76,000 over the past year, his signed print editions offer a considerably more accessible route into a genuinely blue-chip contemporary practice — though, as with any young artist's fast-rising market, results vary and should be approached with appropriate perspective rather than assumed momentum.

For collectors, Party's limited edition prints provide direct access to a practice that treats art history as raw material for something insistently contemporary. Works are held in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Kunsthaus Zurich, and museums worldwide.