Fondazione ICA Milano presents, from Friday 24 March to Saturday 22 April 2023, What A Fool Ever To Be Tricked Into Seriousness , the first personal institutional exhibition in Europe by the American artist Nathlie Provosty curated by Alberto Salvadori. The exhibition takes up the conscious and direct approach that characterizes Provosty's work to investigate the constant misunderstandings that govern the way in which human beings perceive the world, through an unprecedented corpus of oil paintings and works on paper . The work of Nathlie Provosty (Cincinnati, USA, 1981) is based on an expressive lexicon that touches on the innumerable themes linked to the perception of human experience.

Full of conscious irony , the artist's works explore elements of our daily life such as time, space, magnetism, eroticism and gravity through a meticulous use of oil paint and paper. The resulting surfaces caress the viewer's sense of awareness , inviting him to trace and interpret the numerous clues with which the artist enriches his compositions. The self-ironic attitude that permeates the artist's work is revealed right from the title of the exhibition: what a fool ever to be tricked into seriousness is a passage taken from the text by the American poet and physician William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963), where the main character realizes, in a veritable epiphany, that he has struggled for years by relying on a truth that in the end turns out to be as true as the one that was false. Irony is the undoing of duality and limited perception. The poem unmasks duality and the belief in one's own rightness.

The exhibition project conceived for the ICA Milano Foundation brings together a selection of works never presented before together with more historical works which invites the visitor to enter the space of pure perception. Nathlie Provosty's paintings and works on paper are real landscapes of shapes and surfaces , where the measured juxtaposition of planes and colors generates unexpected images designed to portray the contradictions that characterize every life path.