Nicolas Party: Pathway

The Dallas Museum of Art presents Nicolas Party: Pathway, a site-specific mural commission marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Over the course of three weeks, Party worked on-site to produce a forest landscape on the walls and ceiling of the DMA’s Concourse, a public space that functions as the building’s main thoroughfare. The exhibition will also feature a new pastel on canvas portrait, Two Men with Hats, made specifically to accompany the DMA-commissioned mural. Nicolas Party: Pathway will be on view August 19, 2016, through February 5, 2017.

Populated with trees, bushes, and shrubs rendered in Party’s distinctively vivid palette and flat, simplified style, Pathway transforms the Concourse into a large-scale landscape painting, continuing the artist’s engagement with historical painting genres such as still lifes and portraiture. Party draws from a wide range of art historical influences, including the graphic landscape renderings of David Hockney, the bright color planes of the Fauves, and the flat figures found in medieval Christian paintings.

Central to Party’s practice is the consideration of the physical and social contexts of his work. Directly addressing the Concourse’s utilitarian role as the building’s central passageway, the tree-lined mural translates the act of walking through the space into a leisurely stroll through a park or a journey into a forest. In response to Dallas’s harsh summer heat, Pathway also provides an inviting shelter from the sun in which visitors can metaphorically seek shade among the trees and cool off beneath the deep blue sky. 

Nicolas Party: Pathway is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and is curated by Nolan Jimbo, Temporary Project Coordinator, Curatorial, with Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. The presentation is made possible by the Contemporary Art Initiative and by TWO X TWO for AIDS and Art, an annual fundraising event that jointly benefits amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition is included in the Museum’s free general admission.