Drip Check 02: Alex Proba, colour that gets wet

Some artists paint a pool. Alex Proba paints the pool, then fills it, and the work changes. “My art has two lives, one without and one with water,” she told The Frankfurter. For a studio that tufts melting mountains, that sentence is hard to forget.

The work

Alex Proba grew up in Lüdenscheid, studied spatial design in Germany and contextual design in the Netherlands, and founded Studio Proba in Brooklyn in 2013. The studio makes murals, sculptures, furniture, textiles and pool installations. Proba Home is the product line that puts the same shapes on rugs, cushions and glassware.

The project that built her name was A Poster A Day: from 2013 to 2017 she made one poster every day, often from stories her Instagram followers sent her. She calls herself a maker at heart, works out compositions digitally to test them in space, and then executes by hand. Clients have included Louis Vuitton, Google, Nike and Vogue International.

© Alex Proba. Source: The Frankfurter, February 2023, the-frankfurter.com

What we see as makers

Pastels need an edge. Her palette is soft, but nothing in it is blurry. Every blob has a hard contour, often with a thin second colour sitting right next to it. In wool that translates to a one-row outline in a contrasting shade. It makes a soft colour read from a distance.

Shapes come from paper. The Matisse cut-out reference is obvious and useful: her forms look like they were cut with scissors, not drawn. Tufting works the same way. You draw the shape, but you only see it once you carve the edge.

Repeat, then break. A Proba composition is usually three or four shapes repeated at different sizes, with one shape that does not belong. That one is where the eye goes.

© Alex Proba. Source: The Frankfurter, February 2023

The drip connection

Her pools are the closest thing we have seen to Jan Fechner’s drip tufting in another material. Dry, the floor is a flat composition. Under water the shapes bend, the colours shift and the whole thing moves. That is exactly what Jan builds into his drip pieces: a colour that looks different depending on where you stand, and a shape that looks like it is still moving.

Want to make your own shapes with yarn? See the next workshop dates in Paphos.

Cover image © Alex Proba, via The Frankfurter. Sources: Angelina Matousek, “Künstlerin Alex Proba”, The Frankfurter, February 2023, the-frankfurter.com, images credited to Alex Proba. Studio website studioproba.com. Quote translated from German.