In Dead Fish, Nicolas Party surveys his practice through oil-on-copper paintings, each of which is a small-scale reworking of an earlier composition. While copying himself, Party also engages the long art-historical tradition of reproducing paintings by the masters: from Francisco Goya’s Still Life with Golden Bream (1808–12), he has created a direct pastel-on-linen study. The study inspired a related oil-on-copper still life of Party’s own, which in turn became the basis of the pastel mural at the apex of the exhibition. This array of dead fish winds time around itself, bringing the past into the present.
A low, arched doorway invites viewers into the exhibition’s first room. Coated in a dusty Rococo pink, its walls set the mise-en-scène for a cast of painted characters reprising past roles. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41)—a suitcase containing small replicas of the artist’s major works—the exhibition is a kind of Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, presenting specimens from the past thirteen years of Party’s life. In these scaled-down reduxes of earlier compositions, Party translates the soft transitions of his hand-blended pastels as precise strokes of oil on copper. Through the ritual act of repainting, the artist engages in the devotional tradition of the Renaissance altarpieces and triptychs that have informed various facets of his practice, from his use of arched canvases and doorways to his choice of copper as a substrate: the metal was most popular at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, when artists used it to create their own reverential images.
This retrospective in miniature attests to Party’s ongoing reinvention of traditional academic painting categories like the portraiture, still life, and landscape. His portraits of often-androgynous figures estrange any expectation of naturalism, their skin rendered in uncanny shades like scarlet and seafoam green. These busts at times incorporate allegorical elements such as mushrooms and snakes that appear to merge with their hosts. With his nature morte paintings, Party anthropomorphizes his inanimate subjects, as in one Still Life (Copper Version) (2025) in which pears slump over each other as if exhausted, and another, where their surreally smooth, jewel-toned bodies sit up straight, at attention. In certain landscapes, which depict imagined vistas rather than specific places, Party uses otherworldly color and exaggerated form to estrange both nature and time; barren, coral-red stalks in Trees (Copper Version) (2025) pop against an eerily flat blue ground that cuts off their shadows. In other, more expressionistic renderings of invented environments, such as the icy Mountains (2023), Party creates scenes at once familiar and foreign, extending beyond our natural world while remaining anchored in it.
Leading viewers into a second space, another arch frames a view of the monumental pastel mural Dead Fish (2026). The site-specific installation evokes impermanence through both its ephemerality and its subject matter: modeled on Party’s oil-on-copper interpretation of Goya’s Still Life with Golden Bream, the mural depicts five fish with vacant eyes lying in a heap in an abstract field of velvety color. Since its creation in the early nineteenth century, the Spanish master’s original painting has been interpreted as a reflection on his own mortality as well as the unrelenting carnage of the Peninsular War, which shook the artist’s faith. With his three iterations of Still Life with Golden Bream, Party compresses into a single exhibition the centuries-long art-historical process of old master paintings being copied and recopied until they transcend their original authors. Party’s world is one of anachronism and reinvention, where the past surfaces anew in the present.
