This book offers the first-ever survey of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s entire body of work. Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Party now lives and works in New York and has established himself as one of the most important figures of international contemporary art.


Nicolas Party—Rovine (Italian for ruins) features pastels and sculptures that Party has created since 2013. The book focuses on the core genres of painting: still life, landscape, and portrait. Party’s works stand out in these genres due to his use of wild, anti-naturalistic colours, as well as through his extremely precise rendering of the subjects. The artist explains his fascination for each of these genres in accompanying texts. The book also shows a large-format wall painting and a sculpture created especially for Party’s major solo exhibition at MASI Lugano in the summer 2021. Contributions by the art critic and curator Michele Robecchi and by MASI Lugano’s director Tobia Bezzola supplement this beautiful volume.


Text in English, German and Italian.