Nathlie Provosty

Nathlie Provosty (b. 1981, Cincinnati, Ohio, US) lives and works in New York, US. She earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2007). Between degrees, she received a Fulbright Fellowship in painting and spent a year working in India. Provosty’s work is essentially concerned with the theme of perception, the continuous slippage of perception between subject and object and the resulting experience.
The monochrome backgrounds are constructed with exceptional rigour according to highly complex structures that only emerge from the canvas upon close observation. The work is suspended between illusion and abstraction, the physical, spatial and conceptual depth goes hand in hand with punctual research on the theme of doubles, repetition, rhythm and musical writing in general. Using dark blues, bright whites and high-key colours, the artist creates shapes and light shifts, like slight pulsations, that emerge depending on the quality of the light illuminating the canvas. The artist uses mostly curved forms, opaque and shiny pairs, shapes that open up into space through reflective surfaces and outer edges from which overlaps emerge. The interferences imply multiple associations and interpretations as well as naturally conceptual references to the categories of time and space.

Portrait: Photo by Melania Dalle Grave, DSL Studio