Christiane Pooley Turns Memory Into Landscape

There are landscapes that seem to belong more to memory than to physical geography: silent rooms, suspended gardens, fragments of images surfacing like incomplete recollections. It is within this fragile and poetic dimension that the painting of Christiane Pooley unfolds in Trilla, her exhibition at Perrotin in Shanghai. Born in 1983 in Temuco, Chile, and now based in Paris, Pooley creates paintings in which memory, archival imagery, and perception overlap within spaces suspended between reality and dream. After studying at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and later at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, the artist developed a practice centered on landscape as an emotional territory shaped by themes of identity, belonging, and nostalgia. Her works combine vivid details with more abstract elements, generating a subtle sense of instability and estrangement. Pooley had already presented two exhibitions at the gallery’s Shanghai space in 2023, establishing an ongoing dialogue with the city that now continues with Trilla, a project that further explores the invisible traces carried by places and by the body itself.