A Conversation Between Nicolas Party and David Pullins

Karma presents a conversation between Nicolas Party and David Pullins on the occasion of Party’s exhibition Dead Fish at 549 West 26th Street, New York.

Nicolas Party (b. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland) works across the disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Frequently rendered in soft pastel and blended by hand, his androgynous, biomorphic subjects challenge the normative codes of representational painting. Party’s lustrous, jewel-toned works skew perspective and expand his fantastical settings beyond the picture plane. The artist’s fascination with the natural world, and the characters that inhabit it, reveal his interest in the art historical legacies of Classical antiquity, Renaissance painting, late nineteenth-century Romanticism, and twentieth-century figurative painting. Party lives in New York.

David Pullins is the Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where he is responsible for French, Italian, and Spanish art from 1600 to 1800. Recent projects at The Met include the exhibitions Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (2023) and Iba N’Diaye: Between Latitude and Longitude (2025) and the forty-five reinstalled permanent collection galleries with some 700 works of art that comprise Look Again: European Paintings, 1300–1800 (2024). His book The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Getty Research Institute, 2024) was based on his PhD dissertation from Harvard University.

These programs are free, but space is limited. RSVP is essential.

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