Image: Tatiana Trouvé, L’Inventario [The Inventory]. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Xavier Hufkens will present ‘The Auxiliaries’, a major exhibition of new work by Tatiana Trouvé and the artist’s first solo exhibition in Brussels. Opening on 10 September 2026 at the gallery’s St-Georges location, the exhibition will occupy three levels and remain on view through 31 October.
The presentation brings together sculpture, drawing and installation from Trouvé’s expanding practice. Her works are described as inhabiting an intermediate zone in which multiple realities coexist, connected through affinities, echoes and reminiscences. The exhibition’s title refers to the elements, materials and gestures that support artistic production while also becoming subjects and forms in their own right.
The exhibition opens with ‘L’Inventario’ (‘The Inventory’) (2026), a shelving structure that resembles cardboard but is cast in aluminium. Combining still-life arrangements with empty shelves, the installation evokes the studio and storage as places of transformation. Rather than presenting a sense of accumulation, the work suggests absence and depletion, focusing on what remains after essential elements have disappeared.
Travel, movement and temporality recur elsewhere in the exhibition. ‘Les Colliers des villes’ (‘City Necklaces’) consists of objects collected by Trouvé during her travels, cast in bronze, brass, steel or aluminium and painted. The fragments function as condensed itineraries, while ‘I cento titoli’ (‘A Hundred Titles’) continues a work whose title changes annually over a century, from 1968 to 2068. In its latest iteration, a bronze suitcase is suspended between a temporal journey and a conceptual one.
‘On the Eve of Never Leaving’ (2026) draws on sound-pollution measurements taken around Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique. The measurements are translated into lines and structures, giving material form to an otherwise invisible phenomenon. In the basement, ‘Sitting Sculptures’ (2026), from the series ‘Les Ouvrières invisibles’ (‘The Invisible Workers’), brings forward the auxiliary materials used in the studio, including mattresses, blankets, pillows, foam, transport pallets, lifting straps, silicone from casting moulds, fragments, casts and discarded matter.
Upstairs, the relationship between drawing and sculpture is explored through works from the ‘Les Dessouvenus’ (‘The Unremembered’) series, begun in 2013, alongside a new group titled ‘Les Auxiliaires’ (‘The Auxiliaries’). The drawings incorporate chance events, including the path of a hair falling across a canvas and preserved beneath tracing paper. Trouvé was born in Cosenza, Italy, was raised in Dakar, Senegal, and lives and works in Paris. Her institutional exhibitions include a 2014 retrospective at MAMCO in Geneva, a 2022 monographic exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a 2025 exhibition project at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. ‘The Auxiliaries’ opens at St-Georges on Thursday 10 September from 5 to 9pm and is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm, until 31 October 2026.
