At the entrance to New York artist Nicolas Party’s exhibition of new work at Hauser and Wirth Gallery is a vividly colored, full-wall pastel painting of a forest fire. A nearby drawing depicts a vulnerable-looking baby while further into the show, a tiny oil on copper painting of a dinosaur adds to a meditation on changes to the earth’s climate that forewarns an extinction event. In this tiny triptych, Party repeats the forest fire imagery as backdrop to a portrait resembling a northern Renaissance devotional image, typically verdant and detailed-filled vistas replaced by destruction. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 21st).
