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Over the last decade, Nicolas Party has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling reevaluation of the genres of landscape, portraiture and still life, through which he simultaneously celebrates and challenges conventions of representational painting.

Soft pastel is a fragile and ultimately temporal medium that experienced its brief golden age in eighteenth-century France and a revival in the latter part of the nineteenth century, brought about by artists like Degas, Bonnard and Cassatt. Much of Party’s work is created in this somewhat idiosyncratic choice of medium for a 21st-century artist.

‘It’s a very different way to work with colors. If you work with paint, you kind of imagine a color or you work a color while you’re doing it. You have to make it to see it. In pastel, it’s right there.’ The material allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in the artist’s depictions of scenes natural, manmade and imagined.

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1. Nicolas Party, Water Reflection, 2022, Hauser & Wirth.

2. Nicolas Party, Clouds, 2022, Hauser & Wirth.

3. Nicolas Party, Water Reflection, 2022, Hauser & Wirth. 

4. Exhibition view: Nicolas Party, Cascade, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens. Photograph: HV-studio.

Roni Horn, born on the 25th of September, has produced a body of work involving drawings, photography, installations, sculpture and works based on literature, all questioning and generating uncertainty. Her attention to the specific qualities of certain materials spans all mediums, from the textured pigment drawings to the use of solid gold or cast glass, and rubber. Central to her work are nature, humankind, the weather, literature and poetry.

Horn’s ice-blue sculpture ‘Untitled’ (‘The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; …Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din’), is like water, transforms in accordance with its surrounding elements, gradations of sunlight and shadow activate the work.

The conceptual artist and photographer Andrea Hamilton seeks to capture the maximum chromatic variation of the sea. Her documentation of the colour she saw at a particular moment at the same location during the day, resulted in the creation of a unique archive of 20 years. Hamilton’s work places light on the seascape, reflected and refracted to respond to pigments in nature. She sets constant parameters of location and distance of tripod from the water’s edge, centring the frame on the horizon line, which has as a result a collection of monochrome and duochrome seascape photographs. 

Image 1: Roni Horn, ‘Untitled’, 2014 - 2016 © Roni Horn, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London

Image 2: Andrea Hamilton, ‘Library of Sea Colour’, 2000 - present © Andrea Hamilton

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