1:1 is proud to present the painter Nathlie Provosty’s first solo exhibition in New York.

This recent work is the product of the artist’s deep meditation on underlying forms throughout history. In a manner recalling Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Provosty has gathered thousands of images from across culture and arranged them into groups and subgroups, analyzing their inherent geometric structure and its relationship to the emotional content of the image, a visual synthesis of past histories that have become contemporary histories. From that research,which covers thousands of years, she crystallizes basic forms that become the skeletons of her abstract paintings, as sensitive as they are complex. Included in the exhibition is the major work A Week and Its Seven Days: The Merging of Reason and Optical Intuition, a cycle of eight diptychs in walnut ink, which derive their armature from the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1412-1416). As the presence of this famous allegory of time might suggest, much of Provosty’s work deals with temporality, symbolically and phenomenally—searching for ways to enact both the collapse and passage of time within the experience of the visual field.

Her interest in art history, especially the magnificent illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, has also brought Provosty to explore the qualities of painting on sheep skin. These works, such as After Angelico’s Annunciation (2012), are painted on the smooth, internal-facing side of the skin. Once finished they become diptychs, paired below with another corresponding sheet of the sheared exterior. The image is thus situated somewhere in between inside and outside: a proposal of historical translation on the phylogenetic level, and cultural inheritance as an embodied procedure. 1:1 is proud to present the painter Nathlie Provosty’s first solo exhibition in New York. This recent work is the product of the artist’s deep meditation on underlying forms throughout history. In a manner recalling Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Provosty has gathered thousands of images from across culture and arranged them into groups and subgroups, analyzing their inherent geometric structure and its relationship to the emotional content of the image, a visual synthesis of past histories that have become contemporary histories.