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Born in Lausanne in 1980, Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.
Party’s childhood in Switzerland imparted an early fascination with landscape and the natural world, and the influence of this country places Party firmly within the trajectory of central European landscape painting. Considering this historical canon anew amid the current climate crises, ‘Red Forest’ presents Party’s most recent explorations in pastel depicting forest fires. Influenced by his conversations with Bénédicte Ramade, an art historian, art critic, journalist and curator who made a connection between the idea of L’heure mauve (mauve twilight) and the purple and red skies we are witnessing with forest fires, Party invites the viewer to reflect on nature and our relationship with the environment.
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The figures that populate Louise Bonnet’s paintings and works on paper walk a line between beauty and ugliness, between absurdist, knockabout comedy and extreme psychological and physiological tension. Inhabiting sparse, eerie landscapes and boxed in by the edges of the canvas or the page, they act out dramas of profound discomfort that plumb the depths of the artist’s subconscious. Drawing on a range of sources, from Old Master painting to Surrealism and underground comix, Bonnet toys with signifiers—of gender and sexuality in particular—in a playfully confrontational style. Her subjects are at once monumental in scale and diminished in capacity, their limbs grotesquely bloated and their eyeless faces partially obscured by dense caps of hair.
In Onslaught, Bonnet focuses on corporeal fluids as objects of societal disgust, investigating art historical precedents for their depiction and considering the ways in which modern aesthetic and ideological conventions complicate the ways in which they are now received (“We are much more prudish about certain things now than people were in the 1500s,” she observes). The paintings explore our sense of mortification at our own bodies and the way they seem to betray us by leaking, sagging, or failing in various ways. “I’m interested in shame and the body in my paintings,” she states, “and bodily functions bring extra shame and embarrassment.”
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Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz grew up in Saxony, an area that later became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In 1956, after his second term studying painting at the Academy of Art in East Berlin, he was sent down for ‘political immaturity’. The following year, Baselitz moved to the Academy in West Berlin, completing his studies in 1962. It was during this period that he adopted the surname Baselitz, reflecting his place of birth, Deutschbaselitz.
In Baselitz’s paintings, figures are rendered in white and float on their sides on rectangular black backgrounds. Some are set in rudimentary architectural spaces demarcated by white lines, others in an inky void. To make them, Baselitz used a monotype process. First he painted an image of a standing or sitting figure on a canvas and then placed another canvas on top of it, applying pressure with the back of a push broom to transfer the wet paint from one surface to another. Often used by the Surrealists, this technique introduces elements of chance to the final image and here lends a ghostly, skeletal quality to the figures. Rendered in quick, oftentimes translucent strokes of white paint, they call to mind X-ray photographs or cadavers on display in glass coffins.
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Nicole Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. They are a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. Their work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, 2019 Whitney Biennial, and 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster in Münster, Germany. Having established themself as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has expanded their practice into the third dimension.
Nicole Eisenman is French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carnegie Prize, and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial.
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Takashi Murakami is a Japanese painter and sculptor famous for his integration of Fine Art, commercialism, Japanese aesthetics, and cultural criticism into his work. Murakami received his BFA, MFA, and PhD from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he studied Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting). He first gained recognition as a sculptor during the early 1990s, exploring otaku (the Japanese term for an obsession with anime and cartoons) and the contradictions between contemporary Japanese society and American culture in his work.
Murakami teamed up with collectibles platform RTFKT to offer 20,000 avatars in a project called Clone X. Each character will have unique traits and designs, from eyes to clothes, generated through a randomization process.
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The artist’s portraits of Black men are large and mystical, rife with washes of color, in an effort to symbolically reaffirm the Black male experience on earth and on a metaphysical level. Daniels explains that many of the conversations taking place in popular culture leave Black males invisible and quite often lost in discussions about themselves.
Xavier Daniels (1980) is an American painter and former firefighter. He studied at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA, and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Daniels’ work explores usurping Black male stereotypes and mental health stigmas. Additionally, Daniels employs fashion and the avant-garde as gestures to thwart negative perceptions and redefine notions of fraternity.
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