Tatiana Trouvé’s enchanted labyrinth on display at Punta della Dogana, Venice

Have you ever thought that objects could have a secret life? That an abandoned suitcase or a crumpled blanket could hold memories, dreams and even prophecies? If the answer is no, it’s only because you haven’t yet seen the new exhibition Tatiana Trouvé: The Strange Life of Things, on display at Palazzo Grassi from 6 April 2025 to 4 January 2026.

This is not just an exhibition: it is a mental journey, a daydream, an emotional labyrinth in which you will lose yourself in wonder.

Tatiana Trouvé​, Hors-sol (detail), 2025, Collection of the artist © Tatiana Trouvé, by SIAE 2025. Installation view, “Tatiana Trouvé. The strange Life of Things”, 2025, Palazzo Grassi, Venezia. Ph. Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

The secret world of Tatiana Trouvé on display in Venice

With her first major solo exhibition in Italy, Tatiana Trouvé, an artist born in Cosenza but a citizen of the world, transforms the elegant spaces of Palazzo Grassi into a parallel universe.

Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood, the exhibition is the result of a close dialogue with the artist and responds to the carte blanche invitation from the Pinault Collection, which gives free rein to the most daring protagonists of contemporary art.

The result? A total, immersive and poetic exhibition that will make you look at everything with new eyes and where you can admire sculptures, dreams and omens.

As soon as you enter the atrium of Palazzo Grassi, you are greeted by a large site-specific installation designed especially for this space. From there, you are drawn into a succession of sculptures and drawings in which every object seems to have a soul, every shape a memory, every detail a story.

Among the works on display are:

• Unpublished sculptures that seem to have been born from a dream or an ancient memory.
• The Guardians series, silent guardians of other worlds.
• The drawings from the Les Dessouvenus series, large and powerful like visions.
• Around seventy never-before-seen works on paper, directly from the artist’s studio.

What is most striking is the way Tatiana transforms pain and memory into art: the riots that broke out near her studio in Montreuil, the loneliness of the pandemic, the newspaper pages she drew during lockdown. Everything enters her work, everything merges into a personal and universal narrative.

Hers is an art that mixes time and space.

In the exhibition, objects pass from paper to matter and vice versa. Shoes, keys, flowers, suitcases, books, mirrors, radios… each element appears and reappears, as if it had changed dimension or crossed different eras. This creates a continuous movement, a temporal “accordion” made up of past, present and possible futures.

As the artist herself has said, her worlds are held together by mysterious affinities: echoes, reminiscences, invisible connections, while you, the viewer, become part of this open and fluid ecosystem, where nothing has a definite origin and every ending is just a new beginning.

Tatiana Trouvé​, Untitled, from the series Les dessouvenus, 2017, Pinault Collection; The Guardian, 2024, Collection of the artist, courtesy Gagosian © Tatiana Trouvé, by SIAE 2025. Installation view, “Tatiana Trouvé. The strange Life of Things”, 2025, Palazzo Grassi, Venezia. Ph. Marco Cappelletti and Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

Why visit the exhibition

If you love art that amazes even from a technical point of view, get ready because Trouvé’s sculptures use an incredible variety of materials — asphalt, glass, marble, hemp, bronze, mirrors — and a repertoire of techniques ranging from casting to bleaching, from carving to fusion. The result is a universe where the familiar becomes alien, and the unusual becomes poetry.

This is the kind of exhibition to experience and revisit several times.

The event is accompanied by a guide to help you find your way through this enchanted labyrinth, a rich catalogue published by Marsilio Arte and a conversation between the artist and the two curators that will give you an even better understanding of what lies behind “the strange life of things”.

If you need to lose yourself in order to find yourself, if you are looking for an experience unlike anything you have ever seen before, Tatiana Trouvé’s exhibition, The Strange Life of Things, is the exhibition for you. I guarantee that you will leave Palazzo Grassi with the feeling that every object, even the most mundane, has a secret to tell you.

Tatiana Trouvé. The Strange Life of Things
Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood, in collaboration with the artist
Palazzo Grassi, Venice
6 April 2025 – 4 January 2026

See you in the maze?

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