A bit of Montreuil has made its way to Venice. On the top floor of Palazzo Grassi, the museum of the Pinault Collection, at the end of her exhibition "The Strange Life of Things" (on view until January 4, 2026), the visual artist Tatiana Trouvé has filled a room with objects she usually stores in the basement of her studio in the suburbs of Paris.

These include bronze casts of shoes, bags, padlocks, radios, school soap dishes, key rings and dried flowers. A few weeks ago, they left the studio for the Venetian lagoon. "I don't miss them," said the French-Italian artist, born in 1968, with a smile. "I know they'll come back. Anyway, it's the ABC of my work, my vocabulary."

Trouvé, a contemporary art figure and winner of the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2007, who exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 2022, is accustomed to accumulating various objects. She searches for some and stumbles upon others by chance. She makes molds of them, which then feed into her works. Take her "Necklaces" series: delicate creations made of trinkets found in various cities – Venice, Montevideo, Buenos Aires. Other objects become the basis for her sculptures and large-format drawings. "I make no distinction between mediums nor between the scales of the works. But everything is made here. By hand," she said.

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