From bespoke ceramic-tiled swimming pools to large-scale sculptural installations, multidisciplinary artist Alex Proba is blurring the boundaries between art, architecture and the natural world. Cara Gibbs meets the designer whose vibrant, organic forms are evolving into immersive environments that invite people to step inside the artwork.
Architecturally speaking, a swimming pool is almost always treated as an extension of the house or boat – a rectangle of blue positioned to reinforce a sightline, mirror a roofline or simply dissolve into the landscape beyond. Or, in more expressive hands, it may be an opportunity for contrast with a flash of turquoise against travertine or lush greenery.
Either way, the pool is generally cast into a supporting role. But multidisciplinary artist and designer Alex Proba sees something else. “A pool is already such a strong architectural object,” she says. “It seemed strange to me to pretend it wasn’t there.” By her own reasoning, if a form is going to command that much of a landscape, it may as well have something to say.
So Proba did what she has done from one material medium to the next, and derived her own creative narrative. “I love the idea that the pool can become the visual and emotional centre of a landscape rather than quietly blending into it,” she says. “Colour can completely change how you experience a place, and a pool gives you this amazing intersection of architecture, artwork, water, light and movement.”
Finding a new muse, Proba reimagined the pool into a single continuous artwork, rendered in vibrant shades of custom handmade ceramic tile cut into organic shapes. “Once you start thinking about a pool that way, it becomes much more immersive,” notes Proba. “You are not just looking at an artwork – you are potentially inside it.”
The key word here is inside, which would turn out to be the whole trajectory of her practice, though it took a decade of flat surfaces to arrive at it. Proba grew up in Lüdenscheid, western Germany, with a florist for a grandmother, which meant plants and cut stems and arrangements-in-progress were simply the everyday forms of her childhood.
The influence stuck, though not in the way you might expect. There is nothing botanical about her work now, no recognisable petal or frond. “I don’t necessarily reference them literally,” she explains, “but I am fascinated by the way things grow, overlap, bend, reach toward one another and coexist.” Interpreting growth as a set of behaviours rather than a subject, Proba’s well-defined artistic language began to take shape.
Formal training came in two halves: spatial and graphic design at the Akademie Mode und Design in Hamburg; then product and furniture design at Design Academy Eindhoven, which gives context to Proba’s equal ease on a page and in a landscape. In 2011, she moved to New York and did what talented young designers do there: create.
After spending time at Kickstarter and Nike, she started making a poster every day, “completely for myself, without a client or a brief”, she says of the project that would eventually give its initials to Studio Proba. “That gave me the freedom to experiment, and eventually this language of colour, organic shapes, movement and emotion started to emerge,” she says.
Language is the operative word, and she uses it deliberately. Her forms are invented rather than observed. Proba says that “a shape might begin with the memory of a petal, a leaf, a seed, a rock or a landscape and then become completely abstract”, but after years of repetition, they have accrued something closer to character. “They have almost developed personalities of their own,” muses Proba.
“They lean into one another, overlap, support each other, collide and grow together – I think of them less as individual graphic elements now and more as a language.” Which raises the question of what a private language is for, and the answer, increasingly, has been architecture. She saw double the first empty pool she stood in front of. “I saw an incredible canvas, but also an architectural space,” she recalls.
“A pool has a floor, walls, stairs, corners, different depths and as moving layer of water and light on top.” The early ones were painted, but over time she wanted something more permanent so she moved to bespoke cut ceramic tiles made for each project, so the artwork is not decoration on architecture but a constituent of it.
There’s a second, quieter argument in the work. Proba is drawn to the disparity between how a body of water looks from above and how it feels from within. “Similar to the ocean, it looks blue, but the inside underwater is magical and full of colour and coral reefs, although with global warming, these are slowly dying,” she says.
“Making my pools into coral reefs pays homage to the real ones, and hopefully raising awareness as well.” It’s an unusually gentle piece of advocacy, and it works fluently with the language Proba has carefully crafted in her work. A private swimming pool in a warm climate is not an obvious site for an elegy, and yet the perfect place for a message.
When the water goes in it transforms the art’s complexion – never looking the same way twice, thanks to refraction stretching the shapes, sunlight fracturing the composition, colour shifts with depth and then the weather and even time of day.
“I design the artwork very carefully, but once the water goes in, you have to let go of some control,” Proba admits. “I try to create compositions and colour relationships strong enough to work under all those conditions, but I don’t try to fight the movement. The water becomes another collaborator.”
It’s a generous way to think about losing authority over your work, and it hints at where her attention has been drifting. If the pools taught her that a viewer could be inside a composition, sculpture taught her that a composition could stand in the room and look back. When asked what sculpture gives her what a painted surface cannot, she answers definitely, “A body.”
“With sculpture, the shapes physically enter the same space as we do,” she continues. “You can walk around them, see different compositions from every angle, experience their shadows and understand their scale in relation to your own body.” The consequence has been a shift in ambition from making things to be looked at to making places to be occupied, “environments that people can move through, sit within or interact with rather than simply observe from a distance”.
Some of that is already public. Whispering Forms, her site-specific commission for Louis Vuitton in the Miami Design District, had to respond to the existing architecture while remaining part of her artistic vocabulary. “I wanted the shapes to feel as though they were moving through and responding to the space rather than simply sitting on a wall,” she says. “The idea was almost like an abstract landscape unfolding through the architecture.”
For an artist whose language began in the intimate confines of a daily poster, seeing those shapes at architectural scale still carries disbelief. “I spend so much time with projects as drawings, elevations, renderings and tiny images on a screen that there is always a moment when they suddenly become real and architectural,” she says. “Standing in front of the finished work and seeing these shapes that began as such a personal visual language occupying a Louis Vuitton space was pretty surreal.”
For all the exuberance, there is a discipline underneath that becomes obvious the moment you ask about permanence. For residential commissions, Proba thinks carefully about what it means to live with an artwork rather than simply encounter it. Designing something a person will live with daily changes her calculus, though not necessarily in restraint.
“That doesn’t mean making the work quieter,” she says. “I still want it to have energy, joy and personality, but it needs rhythm and balance. I want there to be moments that catch your attention immediately and others that reveal themselves slowly. Ideally you can live with something for years and still notice new relationships between the shapes, colours and surrounding space.”
The same instinct governs what she will and won’t reproduce. Commissions stay one-offs to preserve the moment they were meant for – a specific place, distinct architecture and a point of view in Proba’s own evolving practice. “I don’t really believe in finishing a home all at once,” she says.
“I like when it grows slowly and becomes a record of your life, the people you know, places you’ve been and things you have fallen in love with along the way.” This philosophy feels wonderfully consistent. “Each work belongs to a particular moment, place and period in my practice, and I think it is important to let it exist as that.”
Now, Proba is pushing that expansion, working on larger sculptural environments in which individual forms begin to behave more like landscapes. The boundaries between sculpture, architecture and the natural world are porous.
Allowing the audience to become the collaborators would complete a lovely artistic arc – an artfully curated language turned into a poster. A poster became a mural. The mural slipped into the pool. And the artist who once created one small image each day is now considering what it means to build an entire world around us. studioproba.com
First published in the November 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.
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