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拍品專文
Towering over two metres in height, Back with Gloves is a monumental apparition that formed part of Nicolas Party’s eventful debut exhibition in New York. Featuring a naked figure viewed from behind—wearing only striped gloves, socks and a hat—it belongs a series made for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2017 premiere of Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel. The opera was based on the 1962 Luis Buñuel film of the same name, which tells of a nightmarish dinner party whose attendees find themselves mysteriously unable to leave. Prior to opening night, the Met threw its own surreal banquet for a selection of distinguished guests, who sat in fancy dress among Party’s faceless portraits. The artist had also designed a marble table top featuring ghoulish inlaid images, and was present for part of the evening, sharing the role of ‘butler’ with New Museum director Massimiliano Gioni. Party had played with similar immersive dining performance formats in his early work Dinner for 24 Elephants at the Modern Institute, Glasgow, in 2011, and the subsequent event Dinner for 24 Dogs. At the Met, the works remained on view under the title Dinner for 24 Sheep, referencing the real livestock that featured in the opera.
Aside from its theatrical origins, Back with Gloves captures Party’s virtuosic engagement with pastel: his signature medium since 2013. His interest was sparked by seeing Pablo Picasso’s 1921 pastel Tête de femme in an exhibition: ‘I bought the postcard’, he recalls, ‘and went to the art store the next day to buy a pastel kit. I had never tried working with pastel before and started to copy Picasso’s portrait’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ‘Interview Nicolas Party’, Spike, no. 44, Summer 2015). Party was particularly fascinated by the androgynous nature of Picasso’s pastel subjects: an influence borne out in the present work and its companions, many of whom are ambiguous in their gender. His attraction to the medium, by contrast, was fuelled by quite the opposite impulse: for him, pastel stood in antithesis to the fluid, mercurial qualities of oil, forcing a direct commitment to each and every mark. ‘You can layer and layer, but you can’t start over’, he explains. ‘… Nothing dries or is wet—it stays exactly how it is’ (N. Party, quoted in T. Loos, ‘Artist Nicolas Party Revives the Language of Pastel’, Cultured Magazine, 17 March 2019). Here, the elusive identity of Party’s subject is counterbalanced by the visceral immediacy of its execution, blended deeply into the very fibre of the canvas.
Back with Gloves also captures Party’s close dialogue with the language of Surrealism. In the nineteenth century, the device of Rückenfigur—painting the figure from behind—had been used to encourage the viewer to immerse themselves within the canvas: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) remains a prime example. For the Surrealists, however, obscuring the subject’s face often served to widen its distance from reality, positioning it in an alternative, dreamlike universe. Such was the case with René Magritte: an artist whom Party deeply admires, and whose bowler-hatted avatars are eerily invoked in the present work. In the context of the Met dinner, the figures with their backs to the diners served to enhance the event’s strange sense of mystery: most guests had not seen the original Buñuel film, and throughout the evening—which was punctuated by lengthy gaps between courses—many were placed in the same quandary as the characters in the story, questioning whether they were supposed to stay or leave. The present work continues to exert the same effect upon the viewer: at once entrancing and disarming, it summons a world of theatrical intrigue, where nothing is quite as it seems.
Aside from its theatrical origins, Back with Gloves captures Party’s virtuosic engagement with pastel: his signature medium since 2013. His interest was sparked by seeing Pablo Picasso’s 1921 pastel Tête de femme in an exhibition: ‘I bought the postcard’, he recalls, ‘and went to the art store the next day to buy a pastel kit. I had never tried working with pastel before and started to copy Picasso’s portrait’ (N. Party, quoted in R. Vitorelli, ‘Interview Nicolas Party’, Spike, no. 44, Summer 2015). Party was particularly fascinated by the androgynous nature of Picasso’s pastel subjects: an influence borne out in the present work and its companions, many of whom are ambiguous in their gender. His attraction to the medium, by contrast, was fuelled by quite the opposite impulse: for him, pastel stood in antithesis to the fluid, mercurial qualities of oil, forcing a direct commitment to each and every mark. ‘You can layer and layer, but you can’t start over’, he explains. ‘… Nothing dries or is wet—it stays exactly how it is’ (N. Party, quoted in T. Loos, ‘Artist Nicolas Party Revives the Language of Pastel’, Cultured Magazine, 17 March 2019). Here, the elusive identity of Party’s subject is counterbalanced by the visceral immediacy of its execution, blended deeply into the very fibre of the canvas.
Back with Gloves also captures Party’s close dialogue with the language of Surrealism. In the nineteenth century, the device of Rückenfigur—painting the figure from behind—had been used to encourage the viewer to immerse themselves within the canvas: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) remains a prime example. For the Surrealists, however, obscuring the subject’s face often served to widen its distance from reality, positioning it in an alternative, dreamlike universe. Such was the case with René Magritte: an artist whom Party deeply admires, and whose bowler-hatted avatars are eerily invoked in the present work. In the context of the Met dinner, the figures with their backs to the diners served to enhance the event’s strange sense of mystery: most guests had not seen the original Buñuel film, and throughout the evening—which was punctuated by lengthy gaps between courses—many were placed in the same quandary as the characters in the story, questioning whether they were supposed to stay or leave. The present work continues to exert the same effect upon the viewer: at once entrancing and disarming, it summons a world of theatrical intrigue, where nothing is quite as it seems.