Tatiana Trouve

Tatiana Trouvé
Tatiana Trouvé, 2015
Born	1968 (age 48–49) Cosenza, Italy
Nationality	Italian

Tatiana Trouvé is a contemporary visual artist based in Paris. Born in Cosenza, Italy in 1968, she later spent her childhood living in Senegal, before continuing her studies in the Netherlands and at the Villa Arson in the South of France.

Trouvé produces sculptures, drawings, and installations, many of which incorporate architectural interventions. One of her most well known pieces is the expansive project titled Bureau d’Activités Implicites (or Bureau of Implicit Activities) that was produced over the course of ten years starting in 1997. This piece that took the form of an improvised office environment served as a repository and archive of work that she was making, or planning to make, as a then-unknown artist. Through the creation of architectural modules, the newly Parisian native constructed an administrative space to house her creative efforts as well as her clerical attempts at adherence to the red-tape imbued diktats of the art world. The administrative module is the most significant of this work, because it regroups all the documents that attest to her life in social and administrative terms (CV, grant applications, cover letters, job applications...)

Since 2005, Trouvé has been constructing maquettes or doll houses which emerge from the universe of "implicit activities", which comprise her series Polders. These maquettes take the form of deserted workplaces, recording studios or unoccupied desks. They represent that which has always been there, waiting to be recuperated or reorganised. Placed on the ground or fixed to the wall, these elements adapt themselves to the physical exhibition space, and at the same time they suggest the existence of a different space or environment. They can exist in the corner of a space, in the center of a space, or against a wall.

These Polders look to occupy the space in order to parasite it. "It is with the goal of reconstructing the spaces in which I had been or in which something happened : reconstructions of space, of memory, in the form of maquettes" - Tatiana Trouvé

In an interview in 2009, Trouvé commented that, "Time is the theme underlying all my work." In that, her work — according to art critic Roberta Smith — synthesizes a wide range of sources, including Richard Artschwager, Reinhard Mucha, Ange Leccia, Eva Hesse, and Damien Hirst.