Tatiana Trouvé Creates a New Installation in the Main Gallery at South London Gallery

LONDON.- Tatiana Trouvé’s work spans drawing, painting and sculpture, often brought together in precisely-scaled architectural installations which suggest the possibility of underlying narratives. Trouvé was winner of the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2007, has exhibited widely internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, and had a solo show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2008, yet this is her first major solo show in the UK. For the South London Gallery she creates a new installation in the main gallery incorporating three interlinking spaces interspersed with drawings and sculptural objects.

From 1997, for nearly a decade, Trouvé worked on the construction of her Bureau d’Activités Implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities), a continually evolving set of architectural modules capturing and translating her daily experience into variously furnished spaces. A fictionalised autobiography rather than a direct portrait of the artist’s life, this body of work explored the relationships between psychological and physical space, between real and imagined architecture, which have remained at the heart of Trouvé’s practice.

Trouvé reconfigures and modifies spaces, never completely obscuring their original form but introducing shifts in scale and detail which transform our understanding and experience of them. Taking a set of drawings in her most recent artist’s book as a point of departure, for the South London Gallery show Trouvé divides the single volume of the main exhibition hall into three distinct area, each one offering glimpses into the next, the original architecture being altered but not completely denied.

As visitors make their way through the show, components from the source drawings are gradually revealed as radical shifts in ceiling heights and proportions lend each section its own character. Each element is ultimately derived from the source drawings in the artist’s book through various processes of transfer, from one measurement, material or surface to another. The dimensions of the walls in the first three drawings correspond to those in the space in which they are shown; the length of the copper wires in the central area is equivalent to the total length of copper used in drawings reproduced in the book; and the quantity of ink contained within the hanging wax bags and soaked into the resin cloths in based on the quantity of charcoal used to make the source images. The carefully placed drawings, sculptural objects and interventions suggest a complex web by which they are connected, hinting at the possibility of a hidden narrative to explain their presence as well as at the processes of mutation behind their creation.

Born in Italy in 1968, Tatiana Trouvé lives and works in Paris. She won the Prix Ricard in 2001 and exhibitions include those at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006/solo show 2002), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Geneva (2004), the Venice Biennale at the Arsenale (2003/2007), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008), the Migros Museum, Zurich (2009), Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2010), São Paulo Biennial 2010 and Aichi Triennale, Nagoya (2010).

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