Tatiana Trouvé “Desire Lines” Presented by Public Art Fund and Gagosian Gallery, New York

Tatiana Trouvé’s “Studies for Desire Lines” is concurrent with her major Public Art Fund commission “Desire Lines” at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park. Notes, drawings, tracings, sculptural fragments, and a detailed model of the large-scale sculpture provide a fascinating insight into the artist at work. Desire Lines is a physical inventory of 212 walkable routes in Central Park, which Trouvé mapped and measured.

Consistent with her enigma-producing strategy of exposing only to conceal again—already evident in the Bureau of Implicit Activities (1997–present) —she transferred the measurements into a multitude of colored cords, wound on wooden spools and installed on huge metal racks to form an imposing sculptural environment. As so many of the paths are unnamed, Trouvé then decided to invent an imaginative “atlas” of the history and culture of walking. And so began a second phase of research on the vast historical narrative to which Desire Lines is now dedicated: the social, political and cultural evolution of the march, from the mass activism of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the suffragette movement to the diverse artistic gestures of Richard Long, Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller, Francis Alÿs, Frank Zappa, and Charles Baudelaire. “Studies for Desire Lines” is on view until April 25th at the Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Photo Elise Gallant

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter