Nicolas Party is an iconic contemporary painter and sculptor. He uses bright, playful colors that connect his work to Expressionism and Fauvism, and he creates immersive environments for his exhibitions that tap into both the new and the familiar. Party often creates wall murals as part of his installations, and his work also tows the line between figuration and abstraction. Pastel is Party’s signature medium, and it allows him to explore dreamy and surrealist qualities in his work. The present work is one of Party's unique Christmas cards that he sends to a select group. This one is a smaller version of Red Portrait, made in pastel earlier in 2017. The larger work was included in a solo show at Karma in New York and travelled to the Modern Institute in Glasgow.

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1980, he lives and works in Brussels and New York. Early in his career, Party worked as a 3D animator. This digital work influenced his later paintings because, as Party explains, “we’re so used to seeing computer-generated images now that it has a big impact on how we see all images. I think this describes the look my figures have. I see them almost as like a thin layer of something and I don’t know what is behind them.” Party received his MA from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009, and has since had solo exhibitions across the globe, including at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in DC, the Dallas Museum of Art, and M WOODS in Beijing. He is represented by Hauser & Wirth, as well as a few other galleries including Xavier Hufkens, Kaufmann Repetto in Milan, Modern Institute in Glasgow, Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich, and Karma in New York.