The Pinault Collection has dedicated the entirety of Venice’s Palazzo Grassi to Trouvé for “The Strange Life of Things,” her largest solo exhibition yet, and her first major show in Italy. Born in Calabria, the Italian artist grew up in Senegal and has long lived in France, where her work is better known and was the subject of an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2022. On that occasion, I met her at the Fonderia Nolana, a fourth-generation metal foundry and sculpture workshop outside Naples known for its collaborations with artists, where objects she found were “reborn in bronze and marble,” she said.

The artist, wide-eyed and long-haired, was composing her Guardians in front of me — abandoned chairs with personal items like a bag carved in marble alongside books she loves — Pirandello’s Uno, Nessuno, e Centomila peeked out from one chair. (Pirandello: “Reality wasn’t given to us and doesn’t exist, but we have to construct it ourselves, if we wish to exist.”) 

Trouvé herself worked as a guardian at the Centre Pompidou decades ago, watching over the art and, in case of emergency, leaving a book on her chair as a sign of life in the room. “It was like leaving my ghost behind for the visitors,” she mused to me at the workshop. Now those Guardians, those ghosts of people who are never seen, form an invisible fleet of protectors for the Palazzo Grassi show, inhabiting the first floor. “They’re like portraits for me,” Trouvé said of the works, though human figures are never depicted — only hinted at by their belongings.

Elsewhere at the Venice show, a small gallery room recreates the storehouse of Trouvé’s workshop, with Inventario, where she stacks and hangs her whimsical accumulations of found objects — the flowers, lighters, padlocks, and hair clips that “form a very narrative part of my work,” she said in a video interview at Palazzo Grassi. In her hands, these small-time monuments, rescued from oblivion, are preserved in materials that endure forever — the stockpile of a poetic hoarder.

The most ambitious work at Palazzo Grassi has transformed the entire marble atrium floor of the museum, covering the expanse with Hors-Sol — metal castings of manhole covers and plates from cities all over the world are splayed across the ground floor, surrounded by a bed of black asphalt, so the common street objects converge like a cosmological map of stars against the midnight sky — or islands on dark water, like Venice itself, which mirrors our bodies as, the artist reflected, we too are mostly water.

Trouvé has long made sculptures that draw with metal in space, yet the Venice show rigorously separates her solid works from the numerous pencil drawings on view a flight above, including sixty new works presented here for the first time. Rather than depicting the visible world of possessions we are so familiar with, the drawings let imagination take over, with a narrative that’s harder to parse — where water crashes through homes, or rooms merge into trees or mountains. What unites the drawings and sculptures is a sense of a shadow gathering on the horizon, a future glimpsed of our inevitable end and the end of our loved ones — the end of life. In an era of climate catastrophe, it’s impossible not to read these objects and images as visions of a post-calamity world in which we will be nothing more than the assortment of possessions and spaces that survived.

Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and James Lingwood, the exhibition took Trouvé two years to develop, creating works like Hors-Sol specifically for the show. The space is palatial, but Trouvé’s works are relentlessly intimate, and there’s a tenderness pervading everything — from the vacant posts of the Guardians to the immortalized bronze flowers.

“With a museum exhibition, you write a piece of your history,” Trouvé had told me previously. Now, with this museum show, the artist said there’s an even larger story being told — “the idea of telling people's stories through objects, but also the idea of telling stories about contemporary history itself.” Her works are reliquaries, fossils, artifacts of the everyday — the hangers and bags in marble, the shoes in bronze — because these are the amulets and emblems of our existence, as quotidian and precious as life is to each of us.