Tatiana Trouvé

When quarantine was announced, newspapers from countries around the world that were being ravaged by the pandemic took on new meaning. I began, each day, to draw on the front page of a newspaper—it was a way of escaping the confinement, and of being connected to the strange atmosphere that was spreading around the globe with the virus. This world tour via headlines and front pages was like a journey in reverse. Suddenly, I could no longer meet the world unless the world came to me, through the newspapers. 
—Tatiana Trouvé

Gagosian is pleased to present From March to May, a never-before-seen body of work by Tatiana Trouvé produced in direct response to the pandemic era.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine in March 2020, Trouvé, isolated in Paris, began a series of daily drawings using inkjet-printed reproductions of various international newspaper front pages as her starting point. As the pandemic marched on, spreading instability and uncertainty throughout the world, Trouvé continued to work ever more methodically in graphite, ink, and linseed oil.

Trouvé’s project is linked to certain modernist traditions. Connecting daily realities to poetry and the Symbolist movement, Pablo Picasso utilized scraps of Le Figaro in Cubist drawings and collages that used aleatory haphazardness to literally dematerialize neatly formatted columns of type into a chaotic jumble. In Hannah Höch’s provocative collages, newspaper cut-ups represent a feminist challenge to and reclamation of society’s dominant images and narrative.