Color queen

Above: Alex Proba at home with her partner, Ian Coyle, in one of their vividly colorful rooms.

Alex Proba’s childhood home was predominantly monochromatic. “My parents were both doctors; they escaped communist Poland for Germany. There was not much color or art in our home,” recalls Proba, a New York-Oregon-based multidisciplinary artist, of her upbringing. “My grandma was my one constant. She was a florist but gave it up to raise us while my parents worked. She always had a small backyard garden. We spent most of our time there or in the kitchen.”

These fond memories of her grandmother, who wore bright colors and loved patterns, and an art-loving family in Ohio, who hosted her as part of an exchange program, are the basis of Proba’s color-centric aesthetic. Through her designs, primarily large-scale murals and sculptures, she stimulates the senses with bright hues and patterns and jumpstarts positive emotions with comforting organic shapes. 

“I try to create joy with everything I do,” explains the artist. “I want people to feel happy just looking at my work. I want my art to be a happy place.” 

But that’s not to say her designs don’t have important things to say: “A lot of my work looks fun and perhaps naïve, but there is always a deeper meaning,” asserts Proba, who studied architecture and graphic design in Germany and later furniture and product design in the Netherlands. “I am inspired by nature a lot; I’ve incorporated endangered-species awareness into my sculptures, for example. They always tell a bigger story.”

In 2011, Proba moved to New York City, where she worked for top brand agencies and held a full-time art director position with Nike. She worked long hours but felt something was missing, so she started creating on the side on nights and weekends. “I started Studio Proba in 2013 while working in agencies and design studios,” she says.

Eventually, in 2018, she gained enough commissions to go full-time with her eponymous design studio in Brooklyn. (She now has a second studio in Portland, Oregon.) It focuses on brand design, art direction, product design, illustration, and murals. With this move, she explains, “everything I was interested in, everything I had studied, merged into one.”

Now, clients come to her. Studio Proba is a go-to firm for any brand wanting to make a splash, make people think, or simply spark joy. Her impressive client list includes Louis Vuitton and Samsung, as well as Target and Dropbox. High-profile portfolio coups include a public art installation for Design Miami and the Miami Design District, a basketball court mural for Google’s Pixel Park, and an installation at the Vogue Italia offices for Life in Vogue 2019.

Besides her engaging visuals, Proba considers other senses when she creates. “In a museum, everything is ‘do not touch.’ I want people to interact with my public sculptures, to jump and sit on them,” she relays. Taking this approach one step further, she launched ProbaHome, a curated collection of home goods that are the ultimate in functional, touchable art.

Some of her favorite projects involve pools. “I did my first in 2020,” says Proba of Marrow House Pool in Palm Springs. She used the pool’s interior as a canvas, painting a fun, fanciful mural marked by organic forms that emulate petals and succulent leaves. The project went viral and was covered by numerous media outlets.

Another pool project is underway, consisting of over 8,000 handmade tiles, painstakingly arranged. “My latest is a two-year labor of love,” notes Proba. “I wanted to do something that, unlike paint, will last forever.”