Beginning 13 February 2020, Hauser & Wirth will debut ‘Sottobosco,’ the first LA solo exhibition for critically admired NY-based Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Comprised of new paintings, sculptures, site-specific murals, and an architectural installation, ‘Sottobosco’ conjures the shadowy world of the forest floor in a brilliant pastel universe where subject, form, and time collapse in visual splendor.

Best known for his unique approach to landscapes, portraits, and still life scenes created in pastel, Party directs his idiosyncratic choice of medium toward otherworldly depictions of objects both natural and manmade. With the new works on view at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, he further explores this binary through what Italians call sottobosco. This Italian word for the undergrowth of a forest also denotes the sub-genre of still life painting devoted to botanical and zoological life in nature’s darker regions. Through his unique lens on universal forms, Party detects surprising connections between seemingly disparate worlds – nature, science, the art historical canon – and invites his viewer to consider alternate realities.

‘Sottobosco’ follows Party’s major mural commissions for the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA (2016) and the Dallas Museum of Art (2016), and solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2017) and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2019). In 2019, the artist was awarded the RxArt commission to create a 207-foot-long mural for the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, scheduled for completion in 2020.