Tatiana Trouvé The Auxiliaries

Xavier Hufkens is pleased to present a major exhibition of new work by Tatiana Trouvé, her first solo exhibition in Brussels. Occupying three levels of the gallery, The Auxiliaries unfolds through an ever-expanding practice encompassing sculpture, drawing, and installation. Trouvé’s works inhabit an intermediate zone where multiple realities coexist, each interlinked within a practice that is both generative and regenerative. ‘All the elements that make up worlds connected to each other through affinities, echoes, reminiscences, and how these liaisons map out a shared wandering, without origin or end, in a completely open ecosystem’, Tatiana Trouvé notes.

The exhibition opens with L’Inventario [The Inventory] (2026), a provisional-looking shelving structure resembling cardboard cast in aluminium. Combining still-life compositions with empty shelves, the installation alludes to the artist’s storage and the studio as a place of transformation, where objects and their relationships exist in a state of perpetual becoming. Rather than suggesting accumulation, the work evokes absence and depletion. As Trouvé observes: ‘The idea is to get into a space where a few elements still survive, but where the essentials are already gone.’

Les Colliers des villes [City Necklaces] are composed of objects collected by the artist during her travels. Cast in bronze, brass, steel or aluminium before being painted, these fragments become condensed itineraries carrying traces of encounters and lived experience, recalling the interconnected journeys of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972). Travel and temporality likewise shape the latest iteration of I cento titoli [A Hundred Titles], a work whose title changes every year over one hundred years (1968—2068). Cast in bronze, the ‘dis-adjusted’ suitcase floats between a temporal and a conceptual journey.

Travelling, movement, mapping and circularity also underpin On the Eve of Never Leaving (2026), a work based on sound pollution measurements taken around the Boulevard Périphérique that encircles Paris. Here, sounds become lines, movements become structures, and an invisible phenomenon acquires material presence. Composed of truncated loops and segments, the sculpture echoes the continuous circuit of the ring road, while the adjoining plaster panel, a fragment of Trouvé studio’s wall, recalls the acoustic barriers lining the motorway, linking the artist’s studio life to the murmuring of the world.

In the basement, Sitting Sculptures (2026), from the series Les Ouvrières invisibles [The Invisible Workers], foregrounds the auxiliary materials that enable sculptures to exist: mattresses, blankets, pillows and foams used to drag heavy and fragile objects around the studio, transport pallets, lifting straps, silicone taken from casting moulds, fragments, casts, residues, and discarded materials all reappear in new forms. Retaining traces of their histories even as they assume new identities, these elements reveal the movement and the hidden labour embedded within sculptural practice.

Upstairs, the porous relationship between drawing and sculpture comes to the fore through a selection from the Les Dessouvenus [The Unremembered] series, begun in 2013, alongside a new series of drawings, Les Auxiliaires [The Auxiliaries]. Across both series, Trouvé’s practice oscillates between chance operation and construction, orientation and disorientation: worlds emerge through chemically altered surfaces, while drawings originate in the chance event of a hair falling across a canvas, preserved beneath tracing paper, its meandering path evoking routes, cables and trajectories.

As the boundaries between studio and exhibition, drawing and sculpture, process and finished work dissolve, Tatiana Trouvé’s works emerge not as fixed entities but as temporary constellations within an exhibition as an open network of transformations. Across shifting relations between objects, materials, gestures and places, works continually change status as they move from one form to another, generating new affinities, echoes and trajectories. Rather than resolving into stable meanings, they remain suspended within an ecosystem without origin or end, where different worlds coexist and continually give rise to one another.