Born in 1975 in Geneva (CH), where he graduated from the Fine Art Academy in 2003, Nicolas Freytag travelled for three years in Africa and Asia before settling in Istanbul. He has then lived and worked in London, Belgrade and Geneva.

Nicolas Freytag uses painting to explore questions of tradition in the history of art in relation to new forms of image production. Gleaning analogies and distortions, in the posture of a figure, the fold of a drape or the display of a landscape, he scrutinises the balance of power involved in the trade of gazes by assembling rococo, pornographic and allegorical references. In fact, on the canvas (namely a polyester film: semi-opaque industrial surface worked on both sides), the heterogeneity of the sources (academic paintings, digital contents, figure studies, etc.) as well as the mediums (acrylic, lacquer, pencil, wax, etc.) calls for a stratigraphic approach of the composition. In these scenes depicting an intoxicated nature from which disenchanted presences sometimes emerge, the loss of reference willingly points to a certain melancholy.

His work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Geneva, Barcelona, Belgrade and at the Sharjah Biennial.