“Everybody is an artist for quite a while.”
Swiss artist Nicolas Party reflects on childhood creativity and how to maintain it over time.
“There’s a moment in childhood where every child is extremely creative, and the expression through play, but also creativity, is a major part of the first few years of life. I have two children, and I can see how creative everything is at age three or four. They create characters. Everything becomes something else – like a box can become a table. Everything is a story. It’s very easy to transform the world.”
As an artist, Party argues, you have to keep up this play and commitment to the creative process.
“You have to put in the hours. Like in sports, you must invest a lot of work. It’s so easy not to do it. It’s still the same for me: If I have a free day, I’m going to come here to the studio. If I’m on holiday, I’m going to have a sketchbook and draw in it. I never spend more than two days without doing something. It’s like I just need to do it, basically.”
Nicolas Party (b. 1980 in Lausanne, Switzerland) works across a wide range of different media. Primarily known for his color-saturated paintings and murals, he also makes painted sculptures, pastels, installations, prints, and drawings, and works as a curator. Party often paints landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of everyday objects, stripping them of all extraneous detail. Rather than creating faithful depictions from nature, he uses these seemingly innocuous subjects as springboards for an exploration into the art of painting itself. His concerns, therefore, lie less in the accurate depiction of nature and more in its translation and transformation through color, materials, and composition. Painterly precision, a vibrant color palette, and a keen eye for composition coalesce into works that are accessible and seductive but, at the same time, continue a long-standing art-historical dialogue between observation and the imagination. Party is also interested in the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art. To this end, he regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his paintings.
Nicolas Party (b. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland) lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally including recent solo exhibitions at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NY, USA (2025); Holburne Museum, Bath, England, UK (2025); Hoam Museum of Art, Yongin, South Korea (2024); The Warehouse, Dallas, TX, USA (2024); The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023); The Frick Collection, New York (2023); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2023), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon (2021); MASI Lugano (2021); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2019); M WOODS, Beijing (2018-2019); and Magritte Museum, Brussels (2018).
Nicolas Party was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in his studio in Brooklyn, New York. The conversation took place in March 2026.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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