Existing comment:
Nicolas Party
b. Lausanne, Switzerland, 1980
Draw the Curtain
2021
Commissioned by the Hirshhorn to wrap the building while our facade undergoes a major panel replacement project, Nicolas Party's Draw the Curtain is a site-specific mural on construction screen that combines a rich selection of portrait busts with images of curtains from across art history conveyed in the artist's signature style. Party is best known for uncanny portraits and landscapes in pastel, a material popularized in eighteenth-century France, which imbues his work with its recognizable vivid colors and luminosity.
Draw the Curtain is Party's largest work to date and showcases his astute mining of art history: the enigmatic grayscale portraits reference ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, while the curtains are a pastiche of imagery lifted from paintings by Caravaggio (1571-1610), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Rembrandt (1606-1669), Adriaen van der Spelt (1630-1673), and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), among others. Another touchstone for this work is trompe l'oeil (French for "deceive the eye"), an illusionistic style that leverages the play among light, shadow, and linear perspective to depict objects and figures with lifelike detail and dimensionality.
To create Draw the Curtain, Party first illustrated his subjects in pastel on paper. The drawings were then photographed and digitally combined into a composite image that was printed on industrial scrim. The resulting work conjures a scenographic set, inviting passersby to peek backstage behind the "curtain" on the National Mall and examine both the wide-ranging collections housed within the Smithsonian Institution and the contents of the distinctive government buildings dotting the surrounding landscape. Indeed, Draw the Curtain reminds us of the opacity of these spaces -- and nods to the theatrics of our political landscape -- while inviting us to wonder about what lies behind the facades of the buildings in our nation's capital. |