Project FW.01
Nathlie Provosty
Icons
03/11/2026-04/12/2026
Greg Bergner is pleased to present Icons, an exhibition of four paintings by Nathlie Provosty. The exhibition inaugurates Four Walls, a new multi-year programme of single-artist presentations in a warehouse space in Geneva, in which each exhibiting artist invites the next.
The Icons are small-format paintings that recur throughout Provosty’s practice. At this intimate scale, trompe-l’œil shadows take on a monumental presence. Registers fall slightly out of alignment, and contradictory colour gradients meet at conjoined edges, so that the boundary between two planes becomes a band of shimmering light rather than a line. Glossy and matte passages alternate across surfaces saturated by touch, and colour is used relationally, each hue activating its neighbour.
These are paintings that cannot be grasped in a single glance. A form that is vivid from one position disappears from another; a plane that seems to advance recedes as the viewer steps aside; an edge that reads as shadow becomes, on closer approach, a seam of colour. Seeing becomes something done with the whole body, through distance, angle and time, and the Icons make that process felt, with its hesitations, adjustments and slow arrivals. Meaning is completed in perception, differently by each person who looks.
The title points to a long tradition of images made for sustained contemplation. The Byzantine icon was conceived not as a window onto a distant scene but as a presence that faces the beholder and holds their gaze in return. Provosty takes up the format without its iconography. What her Icons offer in place of a sacred figure is the encounter itself, an exchange of attention between a painted surface and a person.
Nathlie is represented by Bortolami, New York, and A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia.
Press Release + CV