Tatiana Trouvé Maps Disorientation at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels

Tatiana Trouvé's first exhibition with Brussels gallery Xavier Hufkens runs through October 31, filling all three floors with sculptures, drawings and installations built around a single paradox: an artist obsessed with maps who wants to feel lost.

"I spend my time making maps," Trouvé said, walking a reporter through the show. Her surname, aptly, means "found" in French. Her working thesis: "being lost is a way of finding oneself."

"When you get lost somewhere, you start looking at things differently," she said. "You begin rebuilding a path, not the way you already know, [but] something else that allows you to feel awakened in a different way."

What's on the three floors?

The first room holds L'inventario (2025), a cast-metal and stone "inventory" of her studio materials, arranged in rows by type and size on bronze shelves convincingly disguised as cardboard. The catalogue is exhaustive: dried flowers, used soaps, shoes, bags, paint bottles, books, scrunchies, flattened soda cans, seashells, pea pods. Many items exist in her studio. Many are invented. The familiar turns uncanny.

Elsewhere sit black cast-iron and plaster sculptures billed as "diagrams" of noise pollution on the outskirts of Paris. Rendered abstract, the forms curl down and reach into the air, defying the data they claim to measure.

Trouvé has form here. Her breakthrough, Bureau d'Activités Implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities), built between 1997 and 2007, was a fictional office displaying résumés of experience she never had, rejection letters and dead project proposals. It documented time spent thinking rather than producing.

How does she make the drawings?

She pours bleach onto sheets of industrial colored paper. The bleach blooms, stripping dye from the pulp, and Trouvé starts to "build and find the drawing's path." The results read like nebulae — natural and cosmic landscapes colliding with architectural interiors and geometric planes.

"I like this process of being confronted with something I have absolutely no mastery over, where I have to show inventiveness and reflection, and let myself be completely guided by the things themselves," she said. Asked whether surrendering control frightens her, she smiled. "It's always hard, but I think there would be no interest left for me at all if I had control over all of this."

She refuses editions for the same reason. "Doing the same sculpture twice is profoundly boring to me," she said. "My work is always about doors that must continuously open. It's a continuation of spaces."

Where do the ghosts come from?

Trouvé was born in Italy; her family moved to Senegal in 1976, where she began making art under the influence of djinns — folkloric invisible spirits said to live in gardens. "I started imagining that perhaps we, not they, were the ghosts," she said in a 2005 interview.

That inversion runs through the Brussels show. Her Sitting Sculptures (2024–), stone combined with bronze casts of foam padding and mattresses, are completed only when visitors sit on them. "They no longer support the sculpture, but they support you," she said. "There are no human figures, but the human is ever-present in my work, through its absence."

Her "Guardian" series (2013–), cast stone and bronze sculptures of security-guard chairs, partly draws on her own stint as a museum guard. Water bottles, cushions and books suggest an occupant. The occupant never appears.

Even the objects get interior lives. Pointing to dirty plastic bottles, used brushes and squeezed paint tubes within L'inventario, she offered: "This is like a little sculpture that dreams of being a painting. I think objects have a life of their own."

Which work steals the show?

A 2026 untitled sculpture — patinated steel, painted aluminum, marble, onyx and bronze, shaped like a coat rack — appears to have danced across the gallery floor, leaving twirling marks made by its metallic feet. Beside it, a paint bucket and floor markings lead to a pair of black shoes entering, or exiting, the wall.

"Through her movement, in a sense, she is drawing," Trouvé said of the coat rack. "It is also somewhat like ghosts passing through my work."

For an artist named "found," the career-long project is the opposite: staying lost, and keeping the doors open.