Tatiana Trouvé

For her first solo exhibition in Germany (co-organized with the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and the Museion in Bolzano, Italy), Tatiana Trouvé has transformed eight galleries of the Kunstmuseum Bonn into a series of separate but interconnected installations. Each room is presented as a work in itself, comprised of singular sculptures—and in a few cases, drawings—in combination with alterations to the space. One gallery, with an intervention titled Prepared Space, 2014, is blindingly white, thanks to a stark coat of paint that exacerbates the effect of sunlight pouring in from above, an aggression matched by shallow gashes transecting the walls and floors. Bronze wedges are shoved into the cuts at irregular intervals, holding them agape like surgical wounds and making the entire room feel as if it might split open at any moment, swallowing the sculptures—and visitors—within it.

This sense of carefully orchestrated precariousness pervades the exhibition, particularly in the center gallery, which plays host to 350 Points Towards Infinity, 2009, an installation of small magnetized spinning tops, each suspended from the ceiling with taut wire and left to hover over the ground improbably, as if paused while in motion. Illusion is also a common theme of Trouvé’s work, whether manifest in sculptures that only appear ephemeral from a distance but which turn out to be cast concrete or bronze, or in constructed déjà vu moments, as Trouvé has created here by bookending the entrance with galleries that are eerie near mirror images, with only the subtlest variations in arrangement and detail. At first glance, one might be tempted to understand Trouvé’s work in the lineage of Arte Povera, especially when it involves yellowed mattresses, plastic bags, used shoes, piles of black sand, and copper piping. But her evident investment in tricks of the eye—and of the mind—paint her more accurately as a twenty-first-century surrealist, more interested in instigating a double take (and then a lingering, probing gaze) than in elevating humble everyday materials.