Tatiana Trouvé’s Art Is All About Getting Lost and Found and Lost Again

“I spend my time making maps,” Tatiana Trouvé told me as we ambled through her first exhibition with Brussels-based gallery Xavier Hufkens. Map-making is a rather curious obsession for Trouvé to have, given how keenly she wants to experience the feeling of being lost and “disoriented,” she explained.

Contradictions like these are a hallmark across the artist’s oeuvre. Objects aren’t quite what they appear to be. Installations blur the line between archival documentation and fiction. But Trouvé, whose last name, incredibly, means “found” in French, believes that “being lost is a way of finding oneself.”

“When you get lost somewhere, you start looking at things differently,” she continued. “You begin rebuilding a path, not the way you already know, [but] something else that allows you to feel awakened in a different way, to navigate your way and become attuned to things you don’t notice when you know exactly how to get from A to B.”

Trouvé’s Brussels exhibition begins in much the same way. On view through October 31, it features a mix of sculptures, drawings, and installations and spans all three of the gallery’s floors. The first room is devoted to L’inventario (2025), an “inventory” of sorts that contains all her studio materials cast in metal and stone, arranged in neat rows by type and size, installed atop convincingly illusionistic cardboard shelves made of bronze. Here, you’ll find dried flowers, used soaps, shoes, bags, foam padding, paint bottles, books, paper folders, scrunchies, lighters, flattened soda cans, seashells, pea pods—the list goes on. While many of the items can be found in Trouvé’s studio, many are actually imagined. The familiar begins to feel uncanny.

That is also the case with a series of sculptures made with black cast iron and plaster that are “diagrams” tracking noise pollution on the outskirts of Paris. Rendered abstract, these black forms curl down and reach into the air, seeming to defy what they purport to measure. They adhere to an entirely different set of impulses we need not fully understand.

When Trouvé works with diagrams, maps, or inventories, it is to distort them into new forms. Her breakthrough work Bureau d’Activités Implicites (Bureau of Implicit Activities), developed between 1997 and 2007, took the shape of a fictional office installation that displayed things like résumés packed with experiences Trouvé has never had, piles of job rejection letters, unrealized project proposals, and office supplies. Instead of being a workspace designed to meet production goals, Bureau was a display of time spent thinking, both listless and constructive, rather than a final result.

Trouvé seems drawn to anything that implies a semblance of order and finding ways of shattering it along the way. That way of working is less obvious but just as essential in her drawings, which have a cosmological dimension to them. To begin her drawings, Trouvé pours bleach onto blank sheets of industrial colored paper. As the bleach blooms across the surface, removing the dyes embedded in the pulp, she starts to “build and find the drawing’s path,” developing them into floating, overlapping nebulae-like scenes, where natural and cosmic landscapes butt against 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.

When asked if it can be frightening to abandon so much control, Trouvé’s face lit up with a wide, youthful smile. “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 said, adding that she doesn’t work in editions for that reason. “Doing the same sculpture twice is profoundly boring to me. … The only thing that interests me is what idea a sculpture has given me, what thoughts for the next one. In fact, my work is always about doors that must continuously open. It’s a continuation of spaces.”

While growing up in Senegal, where her family moved in 1976 from Italy, Trouvé began making art and was influenced by the folkloric tradition of djinns, invisible spirits who live in gardens. “I started imagining that perhaps we, not they, were the ghosts,” she has said in a 2005 interview.

This magical thinking has extended into her current practice, which can feel both haunted by invisible bodies and animated by our own living and breathing ones. Have we, then, become the ghostly spirits, as Trouvé once imagined? Her Sitting Sculptures (2024–), for instance, are meant to be sat upon, as the title suggests, as a way to complete them. They are made of stone elements combined with bronze casts of foam padding and mattresses, materials that support Trouvé’s other sculptures but are often disregarded or rendered “invisible.”

“They no longer support the sculpture, but they support you,” she said of the Sitting Sculptures, while we took a break on one of them. “There are no human figures, but the human is ever-present in my work, through its absence,” Trouvé said.

Another example of this is in her well-known “Guardian” series (2013–) of cast stone and bronze sculptures of security-guard chairs. Partly inspired by her time working as a museum security guard, they are often accompanied by water bottles, cushions, books, or other belongings that give a sense of the presence of the person who sits there. The guard, however, is absent.

In Trouvé’s telling, her sculptures are also imbued with their own feelings and even expectations. One floor up, as we inspect a small part of L’inventario (2025), she pointed to an arrangement of dirtied, Morandi-like plastic bottles, behind which hang used brushes, dirtied paint pallets and squeezed-out tubes of oil paint. “This is like a little sculpture that dreams of being a painting,” she said. “I think objects have a life of their own.”

Elsewhere, a 2026 untitled sculpture—made of patinated steel, painted aluminum, marble, onyx, and bronze and resembling a coat rack with hangers—certainly seems to have spent some time frolicking in Hufkens’s Brussels gallery. On the floor, twirling strokes and marks appear to have been made on the ground using the metallic feet of the bronze coat rack, as if it has danced its way to its current location, leaving behind traces of its steps. Beside it is a bucket of paint surrounded by more floor markings leading mysteriously to a pair of black shoes coming out of or going into the wall.

“Through her movement, in a sense, she is drawing,” Trouvé said of the coat rack. Like a moving body, the installation “also recalls a person who is not there, these figures without bodies. … It is also somewhat like ghosts passing through my work.”