Tatiana Trouvé: The Strange Life of Things at Palazzo Grassi

Each year, Palazzo Grassi enables me to discover artists I only know by name or don't know at all. This year, it's Tatiana Trouvé. I confess, until now I couldn't make much of the name. Now the Pinault Collection has made Palazzo Grassi in Venice available to her. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood, Tatiana Trouvé presents her exhibition "The Strange Life of Things."

The Strange Life of Things

This is a truly fitting title that opened up a good approach to Trouvé's work during my visit. She alienates everyday objects through unexpected materials. Books and jackets made of marble, suitcases cast in bronze - these objects lose their function and gain a new existence. A marble book cannot be read, a bronze suitcase cannot be opened. They become something else and lead a "strange life."

In Venice, this approach seems particularly resonant. The city itself leads a strange life - half in water, half on land, existing in an in-between world. As residents, we are irritated by the strange life of tourists who stream through the alleys like foreign bodies, transforming our everyday life into a kind of permanent exhibition. Our familiar environment loses its function and gains a new, alienating existence. Trouvé's art in Palazzo Grassi creates an unexpected resonance with this city and its constant metamorphoses.

Here are some notes about the works that particularly stayed in my memory during my first visit.

The Inventario - A Chamber of Memory

"L'inventario" (2003-24) impresses as a room-sized sculpture, based on the storage area in Trouvé's studio. Objects lie there in a dormant state, waiting for their revival. She has cast cardboard sheets in aluminum, transforming their impermanence into durability. On the shelves stand casts of everyday things: flowers, shells, shoes, books, keys, radios.

This memory chamber of her personal lexicon is a monument to the strange life of things. A physical archive of her creative world, where the boundaries between found object and artwork blur.

The Drawings: Les dessouvenus

Several rooms display drawings from the series "Les dessouvenus," which Trouvé began in 2013. The title comes from Breton and refers to people who lose their memory. The drawings convey the vividness and confusion of dreams.

She immerses colored paper sheets in a bleach bath. The chemicals dissolve the colors and create stains reminiscent of drifting clouds or aurora borealis. On the stained paper, she draws imaginary spaces and objects, often with reference to nature - trees, forests, mountains.

Trouvé compares this process to reading coffee grounds. Her drawings create a disorienting mental space where time zones and memories collide.

Navigation Gates and Storia Notturna

The "Navigation Gates" (2024) consist of bronze gates, inspired by nomadic shelters and the navigation aids of the Marshall Islands - cultures that navigate through memory and observation, not through modern technology.

Behind them stands "Storia Notturna, 30 giugno 2023" (2024): plaster casts of impressions after the riots in Montreuil, triggered by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy. Casts of burnt garbage bins and charred storefronts were enlarged multiple times - a document of collective rage, brought into abstracted form.

The Pandemic Works

On the top floor, there's a room I particularly like. It's elongated and opens onto the courtyard. There hangs a series that especially impressed me. On the front pages of international newspapers, Trouvé drew her inner landscape into the outer chronicle of the pandemic crisis. These sheets are simultaneously time document and personal diary. Headlines about infection rates, lockdowns, and societal upheavals are transformed by Trouvé's drawings and given an additional dimension.

The drawings create an intermediate space where collective trauma and individual experience overlap. Trouvé transforms the industrially produced newspaper pages into unique artworks and converts the fleeting nature of news cycles into something lasting - similar to what she does with her everyday objects cast in bronze.

Echoes and Affinities

Trouvé describes her art as a "completely open ecosystem." In 2008, she stated: "All the elements that make up these worlds are connected through affinities, echoes, reminiscences." These relationships create "a shared wandering without origin or end." This quote comes from an article in "Il Giornale dell'Arte" .

As a black and white photographer, I find a deep resonance with my own work in this. In photography too, connections emerge between elements that enter into dialogue. Each image is part of a greater whole, an open system in constant flux. Like Trouvé, I search for moments when the everyday becomes strange and the familiar reveals its hidden dimensions.

The exhibition runs until January 4, 2026.