Nathlie Provosty

Book produced by Nathalie Karg Gallery & Distanz, in colllaboration with The Third Ear, 2016

Press Release

Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Nathlie Provosty’s first exhibition The Third Ear. Composed of two series of paintings, the exhibition plumbs the phenomenon of visual inaudible sound. Inaudible sound is sound that humans physically respond to, although they cannot hear it. Provosty proposes that this inaudible territory parallels the unseeable areas just outside the color spectrum. Her paintings therefore utilize colors at the far reaches of the spectrum, coupled with surfaces that vibrate and disappear, activating an expanded multi-sensory experience.

Resisting reproducibility, the three 84 x 92-inch paintings appear, at first, to be fields of black anchored by a dipping reflective shape. The color, however, is not truly black, but rather layers of dark blue, violet, and various carbon pigments; from these sensuous surfaces, unexpected, images emerge. The smaller works (Dissonance, Assonance, Consonance, and Resonance, all 19 x 15 inches), with their saturated colors and syncopated, sometimes linguistic rhythms, add subtle textural nuance to the overall somatic experience of the exhibition. Executed with exceptional rigor and intensive craft, Provosty’s works hover between illusion and abstraction, evoking elusive fluctuations of physical, spatial, and conceptual depth.

Nathlie Provosty (b. 1981, Cincinnati, Ohio) is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Provosty received her MFA in 2007 from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited at Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery in Belgium; Greene Exhibitions in Los Angeles; Stefan Lundgren Gallery in Mallorca, Spain; Berthold Pott in Cologne, Germany, among others. Provosty’s works are included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Colby Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art.

The New York Times critic Roberta Smith has written that the artist “effectively complicates the perceptual mysteries of Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings with her own sense of scale, atmosphere and material punch. This is no mean feat.”

Provosty’s first publication includes a revealing essay by the writer Jarrett Earnest and a substantial showcase of works dating from 2012–2016.