Xavier Hufkens

On now

• 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.
  Description

  Tatiana Trouvé The Auxiliaries

  Until 31 Oct 2026

  
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• Sim City, Sayre Gomez’s third exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, brings together a new body of paintings, figurative sculptures, and works on paper that continue his engagement with the urban framework of Los Angeles and the mechanisms of image making. Employing various strategies of constructing and manipulating images, Sim City wrestles with representations of a city that is itself a symbol of artifice, presenting Los Angeles emerging as a cultural construction—a protagonist and backdrop, home and fantasy, paradise and myth. At the core of Gomez’s practice lies a sustained interest in examining the foundations and history of how images are made, reproduced, dissected, reanimated and how they function in contemporary culture. His photorealistic works are painted from composite sources, borrowing from personal cell phone photos, stock photography, and found images that are often intentionally distorted with digital artefacts, and analogue camera effects such as sunbursts and the blur of a soft-focus lens. There is a repetitive folding, a push and pull, in Gomez’s paintings that embraces the liminal space between fiction and documentation within the constructed image. The works consequently produce scenes that speaks truths more representative of the socio-political structures of inequity that recur throughout his work. The final manual reproduction – an airbrushed painting – returns the image to the realm of painting through techniques borrowed from commercial photo retouching and Hollywood set painting, practices historically positioned outside the conventions of fine art. The exhibition begins with an opening tableau of two child-sized sculptures sitting on playground swings hanging from the ceiling of the gallery. Modelled after the artist’s young children, the figures assume the guise of Precious Moments figurines, the saccharine, doe-eyed miniatures popularised in the 1980s. Their sentimental, cartoon-like forms are rendered uncanny through the addition of real hair and his own children’s clothing. The introduction of these figures in Gomez’s recent work reflects his growing preoccupation with fatherhood and coming of age at this particular moment in time, within the urban realities that have long shaped his work. Behind them sits a large-scale painting depicting an incandescent orange sun setting over a city skyline. The sunset is rendered strangely indeterminate; its saturation and scale slip the scene into something foreboding. Set against this backdrop, the sculptures function as doubles – simultaneously fictional and deeply personal – occupying an uneasy space between innocence, prescience, and lived reality.
  Description

  Sayre Gomez Sim City

  Until 28 Nov 2026

  
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