A Conversation Between Nicolas Party and Marisa Bass

Karma presents a conversation between Nicolas Party and Marisa Bass 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.

Marisa Anne Bass is professor in the history of art department and chair of early modern studies at Yale University. Her books include Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (2016), Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (2019),The Monument's End: Public Art and the Modern Republic (2024), and the co-authored Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe (2021), all published by Princeton University Press. In 2021 Bass was awarded the inaugural Guggenheim Fellowship in Early Modern Studies. Her research has been supported by membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, among other fellowships. In the summer of 2025, she was the Panofsky Professor at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Bass is currently writing a history of birds in art and her latest book, on Hans Holbein the Younger, will appear later this year.

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

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