French-Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé's work explores time, memory, and materiality through experiments with architecture and spatiality.
Read MoreTrouvé was born in 1968 in Concenza, Italy. She spent her childhood in Dakar, Senegal, where her father taught architecture. After graduating from Villa Arson, Nice in 1969, she continued her studies at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem, the Netherlands for the next two years. Trouvé moved to Paris in 1994, eventually establishing her studio at Montreuil, an area located on the outskirts of the city.
Across Trouvé's oeuvre, she has worked with sculpture, installation, and drawing. Common in her practice is the integration of specific architectural elements and structures alongside industrial materials. Her work interrogates time, memory, and materiality, contemplating the 'endurance of common objects'.
Trouvé's long-term series 'Bureau d'Activités Implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities)' (1997—2007) is an autobiographical work that reflects her life at the time. Inspired by the difficulties of finding employment and working odd jobs in Paris in the early 90s, Trouvé kept the large amount of cover letters and governmental documents she sent out to potential employers. This collection of rejections and unrealised projects is the foundation of Trouvé's series.
Through 'Bureau d'Activités Implicites', Trouvé constructed immersive environments, each organised with intense specificity. The series was a constantly evolving work in which the artist created architectural 'modules', akin to office cubicles, each made with specific materials relating to their content. Some examples of modules included the Module administratif (Administrative module) (1997—2002), which contained Trouvé's growing archive of letters and bureaucratic documents along with regular office supplies; Module à reminiscence (Reminiscence module) (1999), which displayed sealed cylindrical mirrors containing the artist's personal archives on paper; and Module des titres (Titles module) (1997), which was a repository of titles of Trouvé's unbuilt works.
In 2000, Trouvé built upon 'Bureau d'Activités Implicites' by starting her 'Polders' (2000—) series, again playing with architectural elements and perception in her work. In 'Polders', Trouvé scales-down objects in built environments, working with deception and reproduction. These spaces confuse the viewer, allowing them to confront their own size whilst navigating the work.
At her Centre Pompidou exhibition 4 between 3 and 2 (2008), Trouvé further pushed the spatiality of 'Polders' (2000—) by creating miniature mirrored passages, preventing the viewer from easily traversing the environment.
Trouvé was previously commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create Desire Lines (2015) at the southwest entrance of Central Park in New York. This commission involved 212 spools of coloured rope, representing the lengths of distance of each of the 212 paths in the park. The length of each spool ranged from 60 feet to four miles and its combined length approximated the total length of paths in the park.
Tatiana Trouvé's work has been widely exhibited internationally. She has held solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; South London Gallery; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Red Brick Museum, China; and Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Israel. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at MAMCO, Geneva; Istanbul Biennial; Turner Contemporary, UK; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Trouvé's work has been collected by major institutions such as the CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux; MAXXI, Rome; and Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022
