At Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection dedicates a major solo exhibition to artist Tatiana Trouvé (b. 1968, Cosenza, Italy). Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Senior Curator of Pinault Collection, and James Lingwood, independent curator and former co-director of Artangel, in close collaboration with the artist. It is Tatiana Trouvé’s first major solo exhibition in Italy and is conceived in response to the carte blanche invitation offered by Pinault Collection to excep tional contemporary artists.

In her most ambitious exhibition to date, the artist transforms the grand interior of the Palazzo Grassi into a vast labyrinth of physical and imaginary spaces, popu lated by sculptures and drawings in which inner and outer worlds merge and memories, dreams and projections converge.

Starting with the installation conceived for the atrium of the Palazzo Grassi, the exhibition brings together numerous new sculptures with works from The guardians series, a selection of large-scale drawings from the series Les dessouvenus, and 70 works on paper from the artist’s studio exhibited for the first time. Over twenty works in the exhibition come from the Pinault Collection. New sculptures and recent drawings bear the marks of seismic events close to home, including the civil unrest on the streets near her studio in Montreuil in the summer of 2023 and the trauma of the pandemic of 2020, featured on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers and drawn over by the artist in her studio during several weeks of isolation. At the same time, Trouvé’s work evokes distant cultures and alternative systems of knowledge: navigational charts, constellations in the night sky, a treasure trove of curios gathered by the artist on her journeys.

Throughout the exhibition, objects and images migrate from two dimen sions to three and back again, appearing and reappearing in different scenarios. Moving backwards and forwards between deep time, a turbulent present and speculative futures, Trouvé’s work draws the viewer into a concertina of spatial, mental and temporal worlds where, as she noted in 2008, “all the elements that make up these worlds connect to each other through affinities, echoes, reminiscences and these liaisons map out a shared wan dering, without origin or end, in a completely open ecosystem.”

Trouvé’s ecosystem draws on a deep reservoir of images, writings and memories, a wide repertoire of techniques including pouring and casting, bleaching and drawing, carving and threading, and an extraordinary range of materials from asphalt and marble, bronze and hemp, glass and mirrors. She brings these to bear on an extraordinary range of objects, including rocks and flowers, suitcases and shoes, locks and keys, radios and recorders, blankets and books to build, in her sculptures and drawings, worlds which are at the same time, disorienting and mesmerising, troubling and beguiling.

The exhibition is accompanied by a visitor’s guide and a catalogue pub lished in collaboration with Marsilio Arte (Venice) with texts by Emma Lavigne, Bruno Racine, Neville Wakefield and Barbara Casavecchia, as well as a conversation between Tatiana Trouvé, Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood.

The exhibition will also be enriched by a series of conferences and cultural events open to the public, including, on 6 April, a live performance by musician and com poser Warren Ellis, who will perform a solo violin improvisation in the atrium of Palazzo Grassi, first opening day of the exhibition to the public, on 17 April, a concert by Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld, authors of the composition Denebola. An unpublished piece written for the exhibition, and on 16 May, the public talk with Tatiana Trouvé, Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood.