Nathlie Provosty's 2016 exhibition at Nathalie Karg Gallery explores abstraction through contrasting scales

Nathlie Provosty presented her solo exhibition 'Thank You For What Is Underneath' at Nathalie Karg Gallery from March 30 to May 15, 2016. The show featured both large-scale and smaller paintings that engaged with different approaches to abstraction. Three monumental dark canvases—West, Gilles, and Twice Six—dominated the gallery space with their U-shaped black forms against matte backgrounds. These works employed glossy applications that created subtle textural variations while maintaining surface sheerness. Smaller paintings with titles like Assonance, Dissonance, Consonance, and Resonance offered more complex compositions with explicit geometric dislocations and color contrasts. The exhibition prompted consideration of how reduction and elaboration function across different scales, with the larger works suggesting modernist singularity and the smaller ones evoking traditional density. Provosty's approach was contextualized within art historical references including Alberto Burri's late Celotex paintings, Ad Reinhardt's black works, and Suzan Frecon's geometric abstractions. The review noted how the artist's peers among younger abstract painters often gravitate toward rhetorical neo-formalist statements or intentionally irresolvable open-endedness. Located at 291 Grand Street in New York City, the exhibition demonstrated Provosty's investigation of pictorial subtleties through both monumental restraint and intricate compositional complexity.