Tatiana Trouve - From March to May

This artist's book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Tatiana Trouve: From March to May at Gagosian, 976 Madison Avenue, New York. Confined to her studio in the suburbs of Paris for the course of a fifty-five day lockdown that began in March 2020, Trouve was inspired by an unsettling headline about the COVID-19 pandemic from the newspaper Liberation to begin a series of fifty-six drawings, using printouts of front pages from international newspapers as the grounds. Treating the pages like serialized canvases, she used graphite, ink, and linseed oil to layer images over surfaces already dense with photographs and text. "I thus made a voyage while staying in place," she writes, "in a still and silent world that had closed its doors to count its dead." Presented in the form of an unbound newspaper and housed in an oversize envelope designed by the artist that features printed stamps from all of the countries represented in the series, Tatiana Trouve: From March to May reproduces the drawings in chronological order and underscores the persistent presence of the newspaper as a vehicle for engagement with the world at large.