Working across a range of practices and mediums while rejecting traditional classifications, Swiss-born visual creative Nicolas Party is a rising star in the international art world, revered by both critics and collectors for his vividly saturated landscapes. Party eschews strict principles of representation for a mode of depiction that is more gestural, painting objects that are stripped of all extraneous detail while laden with a soft innocence. While his compositions are imbued with a kind of surreal simplicity, they also display a commitment to celebrating yet challenging the conventions of representational painting. In this way, Party adopts an idiosyncratic practice that invokes the Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s great axiom: “I only want to do simple, very simple art”.

In Two Pots (2019), the artist creates a duality of detached, biomorphic shapes that reference watering pots in a kind of abstract garden arrangement, being both natural and synthetic. One is instantly transported to a world of preternatural imagination, a kind of Dr. Seuss-meets-Alice in Wonderland cataclysm of polychromality and hallucinogenic still life, in which these two structures skew our perspective and seem to loom over us.

Seeming at once familiar and new, Party is at the zeitgeist of a change in contemporary taste. Signed by international gallery juggernaut Hauser & Wirth last year, and becoming one of the youngest members on their esteemed roster, the artist is helping shift attention from the process-based abstraction of Zombie Formalism to the stimulating but dreamy surrealist figuration, alongside characters like Jamian Juliano-Villani and Christina Ramberg. Through his skilled execution of abstract forms and playful application of colour, Nicolas Party adopts the practices of Franz Marc and David Hockney within his own unique, distinct expression. The present lot is a vibrant manifestation of this; a work that is accessible and seductive, yet all the while connects the dots between observation and imagination.