the work is a permanent installation

Giant Fruits

The opportunity for the Florence exhibition was provided by the purchase of a work by Nicolas Party titled “Giant Fruit”, which officially became part of the Antinori family’s permanent collection in the Chianti Classico winery (located at Bargino, near Florence). The work “Giant Fruit” is a site-specific project created in 2015 for the group show Still-life Remix, held in the evocative setting of the winery that was inaugurated three years before.

The gigantic Still Life is a response to the winery’s innovative architecture, built using natural materials such as terra cotta, timber, corten steel and glass, expressing the family’s deeply-rooted links with the territory, and respecting the beauty of the location that has always provided the frame for the Antinori vines. The art piece transforms the sense of perception with an unexpected change of scale.

Before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nicolas Party painted graffiti on train carriages and in degraded urban spaces. The large pyramid of giant fruit in symbolic colours made by the artist using spray-cans in the Antinori winery in the Chianti Classico district is a direct reflection of his experience as a street artist.

Nicolas Party started his artistic career in Lausanne, Switzerland as a street artist. He then studied at the Glasgow School of Art and since 2002 has been showing his work in various galleries and institutions including the Swiss Institute of New York and Paris and the SALTS Art Space in Basel. Nicolas Party’s works express the artist’s obsession with timeless shapes and subjects that he conjures from our collective imaginations, art history, comics and graphic design thanks to mediums ranging from charcoal to watercolors to spray paint.

The artist uses paintings or site-specific installations to ironically disclose a series of rich and subtle system of quotations and references that create a familiar visual code yet distinctly personal and highly recognizable. As a successor of the artist Balthus, Party creates a surreal and dreamlike world where giant fantastically colored fruit wraps around the architecture of the winery.