This year’s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art has been awarded to Nathalie Alfonso, a Colombian-born artist whose approach to art is a deeply embodied, process-driven experience. Her work is rooted in the intensive, laborious practice of gestural drawing. In monumental scale, Alfonso transforms spaces into expressive site-specific and ephemeral works, created through an infinite amount of repeated and controlled bodily movements. The gestural nature of her work, which emphasizes action and the trace of motion, can be seen as a continuation of an impressive lineage of artists like Lee Krasner and Cy Twombly, who used gesture to transfer emotion and physicality into their paintings and drawings.
This practice is also directly informed by Alfonso’s personal and physical history, her upbringing, and her environment. Indeed, her connection to movement and physical labor began early. In Colombia, she trained as a competitive athlete from childhood, developing an extreme disciplined relationship with her body that prioritized repetition and endurance. After emigrating to the U.S. at 18, while studying, she also turned to physical labor by cleaning houses, to compensate for the inactive lifestyle associated with her mostly desk-bound situation.
In this new environment, full of new routines, Alfonso rediscovered the relationship between gesture, effort, and rhythm. Cleaning became a form of embodied research. Through its motions—brushing, scrubbing, polishing, waxing, rinsing, on repeat—she became acutely aware of her body, its habits, and its expressive capacity. She also became deeply conscious of the often-overlooked nature of labor, and of the invisibility of the “little hands” that work tirelessly behind-the-scenes.
Rather than separating art from labor, Alfonso brings them together. Her drawings become performative, due to their repetitive physical action. They are also real endurance feats. Her most ambitious project to date, the piece Alfonso created for the Florida Prize, LineScape—Onset, took three weeks of continuous action to complete.
While it may appear as an abstract, painted in subdued hues with faint lines evocative of a landscape, and starker grid lines echoing the architecture of the gallery—with its geometric ceiling grid and unseen wall studs—the piece was drawn using pastels across the entire 87 ft wide by 17 ft high gallery wall. Scrubbing away charcoal and graphite powder, layering color and washing it away—it speaks to the unseen labor and the physical toll behind these seemingly simple marks, echoing the domestic work of her past life, and reframing cleaning as a generative, even poetic, act. It also speaks of the loving care, attention to detail, and willingness of some to tackle undesirable and seemingly unsurmountable tasks.
Many of Alfonso’s works are also inspired by her regular five-hour bike rides through the Florida Everglades. Directly on the wall, Alfonso translates her interpretation of the wetlands—their tangled ecosystems, delicate flora, and ecological significance. The impression of a misty morning light is transferred onto a monumental ephemeral gestural abstract, evoking the fragility, vulnerability, and transience of our environment. The omnipresence of the work also recalls the importance of unseen wildlife, wildflowers, and insects, and the crucial role they play in maintaining the region’s ecological balance.
LineScape—Onset is not a static landscape but a record of performance. Every line is the result of sustained, physical engagement—the product of prolonged exertion, transforming ordinary gestures into artistic acts, and tracing the pathways of the artist’s body across space and time.
As writer Germán Escobar states, Alfonso’s drawings emerge not as illustrations but as “events”—they are traces of energy, repetition, and muscle memory. At its core, Alfonso’s practice is about making the unseen visible—whether it is the gesture of the artist behind the artwork, the labor behind the cleanliness of a home, or the ecosystems behind the beauty of a landscape. They pay homage to the unseen presences whose quiet contributions sustain our world, through their acts of perseverance, endurance, and care.
