Many artists can recall a specific portray or affect that lit the torch of inspiration. As a teenager Jean-Michel Basquiat copied his favorite cartoons. Frida Kahlo realized to attract with the assistance of a household pal who was a printmaker. Nicolas Occasion’s muse was barely extra uncommon: rising up in Lausanne, he contemplated the labels of wine bottles, which frequently depicted lush Swiss vineyards. “These little watercolour drawings on the stickers confirmed me how an artist can put emotion right into a panorama,” he says. “Images displays the fact, however the portray of a spot holds the feelings of its maker, too.”
Mr Occasion studied on the artwork faculty in his hometown, then in Glasgow, graduating in 2009. It's clear from his early work—research of bushes or family objects in pencil, rocks painted to appear like hunks of meat—that he had discovered the softly surreal model that will turn into his signature. He had additionally discovered his most popular medium. “After I was a pupil at Glasgow Faculty of Artwork, a piece would take months to dry in my damp studio,” he says. Annoyed by the point that oil portray demanded, he turned as a substitute to pastel and located he loved its speedy and tactile qualities. “With the ability to instantly use my fingers seems like touching somebody, identical to placing basis onto a face.”
The artist, now primarily based in New York and Brussels, produces portraits, nonetheless lifes and landscapes in pastel, normally on linen. His daring, typically jarring, usually dreamlike use of color is harking back to the Fauvist painters of the early twentieth century. He additionally cites Rosalba Carriera, a Venetian Rococo painter, as an affect and has purchased two of her photos.
Lately Mr Occasion has attracted the curiosity of the artwork world. In 2019 he joined Hauser & Wirth, a serious worldwide gallery, and have become one of many youngest artists in its roster. Museums in Beijing, Los Angeles and New York have mounted reveals of his work. In September he erected “Draw the Curtain”, an enormous set up, over the non permanent scaffolding of the Hirshhorn museum in Washington. It is going to stay on show by way of the spring.
This consideration has pushed up the worth of his canvases. In 2018 “Sundown” (2018) bought for $330,000 at public sale. In December Christie’s in Hong Kong included a nonetheless life from 2015 in a sale bringing collectively the “most sought-after artists of the second”; it went for HK$22.4m ($2.8m). “Panorama” (2021) had bought a month earlier for $3.2m, greater than ten occasions its decrease estimate.
“L’heure mauve” (“Mauve twilight”), a brand new exhibition on the Montreal Museum of Fantastic Arts (mmfa), is the largest present of Mr Occasion’s work to this point. Alongside 60 of his personal items, together with 4 site-specific murals, he has chosen nearly 50 objects from the museum’s 45,000-strong assortment to juxtapose together with his personal. It's the first time the Canadian museum has given an exhibiting artist a curatorial position in its 161-year historical past. The present’s theme is people’ relationship with the pure world.
Mr Occasion’s pastels, a few of which haven't been displayed earlier than, are related in composition to portraits by Western masters however askew in another means. “Portrait with Snakes” (2019, pictured) depicts the pinnacle and torso of a human determine, which stares out of the body with a deadpan expression. However the topic has shiny, nearly neon, yellow pores and skin with coiffed crimson hair, which is embellished with a butterfly. Under the shoulders the physique morphs right into a thick, lengthy serpent; one other butterfly hangs within the air in entrance of the creature’s mouth. Mr Occasion has chosen to show this portray alongside two by Otto Marseus van Schrieck, a Dutch Grasp: “Forest-floor Nonetheless Life with Three Snakes, Lizard and Toad” (1663) and the undated “Nonetheless Lifetime of a Thistle and Different Flowers Surrounded by Moths, a Dragonfly, a Lizard and a Snake, in a Panorama”. The works share a way of darkness and menace.
Pears—a favorite object of Mr Occasion’s—snakes, caves, sunsets and peaches recur all through the exhibition; they're rendered in wealthy, unorthodox shades of pink and purple. “The Woodcutter” (1910), Ferdinand Hodler’s social-realist portray of a person about to strike down a tree, is exhibited alongside two of Mr Occasion’s pastels from 2015, “Tree Trunks” and “Panorama”, in addition to wood chairs by J & J Kohn, an Austrian furniture-maker. The smooth shapes and eccentric colors in Mr Occasion’s woodland scenes distinction with the motion of Hodler’s determine in addition to the transformation of bushes into practical objects. “The presentation right here invitations us to take a look at a classical portray related to nationalism and labour by way of an environmentalist angle,” Stéphane Aquin, the mmfa’s director, says. “The present invitations us to rethink our relationship with nature, from the locations we conquered to the harm we’ve created.”
Mr Occasion has joined a bunch of acclaimed Swiss artists together with Urs Fischer, Pipilotti Rist, Thomas Hirschhorn and the duo Fischli & Weiss. The 41-year-old might but surpass all of them. Phaidon revealed a lavish monograph of his oeuvre this month, heralding him as “one of the vital profitable and critically acclaimed artists working in the present day”. In April Museo Poldi Pezzoli, a museum in Milan, will mount Mr Occasion’s subsequent solo exhibition. For the artist, the gross sales and the eye permit him to spend extra time in his studio overlooking Manhattan. At present he appears for inspiration not on wine bottles however in one in all Carriera’s pastel work, which hangs on the wall. ■
“L’heure mauve” continues on the Montreal Museum of Fantastic Arts till October sixteenth
Picture credit: “Dawn”, 2018. Non-public assortment, courtesy of Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. © Nicolas Occasion. Photograph Isabelle Arthuis. “Portrait with Snakes”, 2019. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard Assortment, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Establishment, Museum buy with funds offered by Stuart Barr, 2021. © Nicolas Occasion. Photograph Adam Reich
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