After her graduation from MICA and a year as a Fulbright Scholar in India, Nathlie Provosty ’04 (Painting BFA) experimented with a variety of media — including collage, sculpture, and video — and sought to refine her artistic vision. Nothing stuck, until the Brooklyn-based artists started doing automatic drawing. The practice, popularized by Surrealists artists in the 1920s, involves continuously making marks on a blank sheet of paper, without a plan, as a means to tap into the subconscious.

The exercise was a spark. Provosty used the abstract shapes she created in a series of paintings, and after having persevered for so long, she found her voice — and a place among today’s most dynamic young contemporary artists.

Recently profiled in W magazine, which celebrated a new generation of groundbreaking female abstractionists, Provosty is known for abstract paintings that use dark blues, bright whites, and occasionally high-key colors to create letter-like forms. And since that first breakthrough, she has exhibited around the world — at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway, and the Risorgimento Museum in Turin, Italy. Her work is in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art as well as the Baltimore Museum of Art. In February 2024, her work can be seen in a solo show at Miami’s Nina Johnson gallery, which comes on the footsteps of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Milan, Italy, in 2023.