Nicolas Party: Clotho

Nicolas Party: Clotho
14th October, 2025 – 20th December, 2025
Hauser & Wirth London
23 Savile Row
London W1S 2ET

Swiss painter Nicolas Party stages his first solo show at Hauser & Wirth London, where portraits and treescapes in pastel confront themes of mortality, renewal and time’s passage.

The show, which features new portraits and treescapes in pastel, continues Party’s exploration of representational painting while testing the boundaries of its traditions. His portraits draw on two sculptural works — Camille Claudel’s Clotho (1893) and Auguste Rodin’s She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife (1885–87) — both meditations on ageing and decline. In Party’s hands, these references become a framework for the exhibition as a whole, which confronts mortality with characteristic intensity.

Party, celebrated for his mastery of soft pastel, exploits the medium’s immediacy and saturated colour to striking effect. His exhibitions are conceived as immersive environments, often incorporating architectural interventions. For this show, he has washed the walls in an electric blue and punctuated the galleries with arches, guiding visitors through a sequence that culminates in a vast treescape.

The exhibition opens with Portrait with Camille (2025), which reimagines Claudel’s Clotho, the mythological spinner of life’s thread. Party’s rendering captures the fragility of flesh and the inexorable passage of time. A second portrait, Portrait with Auguste (2025), responds to Rodin’s bronze of a once-beautiful woman worn down by age. Together, the works evoke the entwined artistic and personal histories of Claudel and Rodin, while staging a dialogue on beauty, loss and remembrance.

Yet within Party’s painted portraits, the central figures remain untouched: serene, youthful, and motionless. Frozen in an idealised present, they stand in stark contrast to the sculptural models that inspired them — embodiments of stillness against the inevitability of decay.

Beyond these figures, the exhibition turns to the landscape. Party’s treescapes — a recurring motif in his work — invite reflection on natural cycles of growth and decline. Some scenes are verdant and full, others skeletal and bare, their leafless branches recalling bone-like forms. In their seasonal rhythms, the trees become emblems of mortality and renewal.

In one striking canvas, a waterfall slices through the otherwise still woodland, a reminder of time’s unstoppable flow. The torrent, disruptive yet vital, serves as a counterpoint to the rootedness of the trees — a symbol of transformation that unites the exhibition’s themes of impermanence, change and return.

Party’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth coincides with Nicolas Party: Copper & Dust at the Holburne Museum in Bath, on view until 31 August 2025. That show includes a monumental pastel mural created in response to a work from the museum’s collection, which remains on display until 19 October 2025.

Nicolas Party: Clotho opens on the 14th of October, 2025 until the 20th of December, 2025 at Hauser & Wirth London

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