The artist’s most substantial show to date, The Strange Life of Things, resituates materiality as a continual process of preservation
As the title of her most substantial show to date suggests, Tatiana Trouvé’s artistic universe is characterised by the surprising peregrination of images, writings and memories, as well as by a rich variety of objects: suitcases, shoes, keys, chairs, benches, tape recorders, blankets, books, etc. These latter items converge, in the French-Italian artist’s work, in a continual process of attempted preservation; they’re faithfully reproduced in materials including stone, marble, bronze, copper, brass, glass, plaster and aluminium, and via techniques including casting, carving and drawing. When Trouvé’s sculptures and drawings coexist in largescale projects like this one – more than 150 works from 2003–25, 20-plus from the Pinault Collection – they generate narratives that undo geographic and temporal coordinates. Recontextualised sculptures, symbols of farflung cultures and alternative knowledge systems are configured into a community of forms that carry traces of time and history, from personal and happenstance episodes to dramatic and collectively experienced events.
Cities (2024), for example, comprises a vast collection of ‘necklaces’ made of found branches, bones, insects, feathers, shells, cigarette lighters and more cast in bronze and copper, then painted and strung together. Storia Notturna, 30 giugno 2023 (2024), meanwhile, is an immense sculpture of a plaster wall whose rough cast surfaces originated in some ‘impressions’ of ‘residues’ that the artist collected in the summer of 2023 – such as scorched shopfronts and burned bins – after civil unrest in the streets near her studio in the Paris suburb of Montreuil, following the fatal police shooting of a seventeen-year-old boy of African descent. The work preserves, at a remove, the anger of the citizens, and serves as a symbolic barricade between them and a society that tends to make them invisible.
The Strange Life of Things unfolds as a structure of affinities and echoes between elements and images in which the idea of circulation is expressed not only in the unpredictable combination of works, but also the specificity of their symbolism. Take Hors-sol (2025), a site-specific asphalt platform punctuated by aluminium, bronze and brass casts of manhole covers and metal plates found in Paris, London, Rome, Venice and New York. Covering the entire floor of the venue’s atrium, this work functions as an imaginary map of access points to the subterranean infrastructure of contemporary cities – their pipes, vents, circuits, conduits. When viewed from the floor above, though, the scale of the elements is inverted, and what looked like a street now appears as a constellation of planets in an unknown galaxy.
Scattered throughout the museum’s first floor are extracts from Notes on Sculpture (2022–25), an assemblage of cast objects from the artist’s studio named after a specific time and person, and The Guardians (2013–), chairs and benches with books and personal items carved from stone and positioned like sentinels in different rooms. The second floor mainly showcases series of drawings that the artist has been working on since 2005. In the Intranquillity series (2005–), inspired by the eponymous mixed-emotion concept of writer Fernando Pessoa, the absence of human presence is counterbalanced by layers of images of anonymous institutional and storage spaces; in the series Les Dessouvenus (2013–), the same subjects appear invaded by forests and mountains, as in a faded dream. Here and elsewhere, there’s a sense that as things voyage through time and space, they invariably change and interfuse; and that if you can’t hold onto the past, attempting to do so can lead to making something unexpected and new.
The Strange Life of Things at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, through 4 January 2025
