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If you happen to be in Glasgow over the next few weeks, make sure to catch Still Life oil paintings and Landscape watercolours by Swiss artist NICOLAS PARTY at the Modern Institute. Bringing together wall drawings, spray-painted murals, intimate paintings, and watercolour works, the show reveals the roots of PARTY‘S painterly practice and constructed worlds.

‘Still life oil paintings and Landscape watercolours’ presents the form of a theatre stage; the wall mural acts as the backdrop within which the play unfolds. Each still life painting depicts a scene in this play. The surface of the canvas is the stage and each object represents a character within the story. This Tableau vivant can only be successful if all the fundamental aspects of the language of painting are put to use. This formal discourse, as dictated by the traditional remit of painting, allows PARTY to develop an exchange between painting’s position within art history and this theatricality of representation.

Despite adopting classical aspects of exhibition history, the result is not an exhibition but an installation; a play that offers objects a space on stage. – LAURA EDBROOK

Of course, these images don’t do justice to the exhibition: Still life oil paintings and Landscape watercolours runs until 8 May 2013 at the Modern Institute in Glasgow, United Kingdom.