Alexandre de Betak: TRUSS LIGHT SCULPTURES 01 — Alexandre de Betak

This November, Salon 94 Design presents TRUSS LIGHT SCULPTURES 01, the first exhibition of sculpture by Alexandre de Betak and his first solo show in New York. Across two rooms, de Betak presents twelve works in which light, industrial form and material transformation are brought together into a new sculptural language.

For more than three decades, de Betak worked with light, scale and the dynamics of perception to redefine the spectacle of live shows. In this new body of work, he turns to the very apparatus that made them possible – the truss and the stage light. De Betak transforms this peripheral infrastructure from supporting act to protagonist – reimagining it as something with its own permanence, atmosphere and presence.

These new sculptures extend de Betak’s ongoing explorations of light, scale and material contrasts. In 2025, coinciding with Frieze London, de Betak turned his London studio into a large-scale environment of light and mirrors, an evolving work that recast stark office lighting as something sublime. In early 2026, for Gstaad Art Week, he conceived a site-specific work within a traditional Swiss barn in the Bernese Oberland, drawing a line between alpine and Japanese traditions of restraint and ritual. Each is driven by the same instinct for reversal – harsh industrial light rendered warm, the utilitarian made otherworldly.

The exhibition unfolds across two series and two rooms. In the gallery’s contemporary space, a series of works are composed using genuine trusses and stage lights – raw aluminum, reassembled into large-scale freestanding and wall-mounted forms. In the historic Beaux-Arts Stone Room, the same forms are transfigured into bronze – hand-cast in a French foundry through an exacting process of moulding, casting, sandblasting and polishing, with over twenty moulds required for a single piece. Forms that once served the temporary image are now rendered in a material long associated with permanence, memory and monument throughout art history.

Each sculpture incorporates prismatic glass and bespoke light sequences, allowing the works to shift between stillness, pulse, shimmer and sound-responsive movement. Light is not an effect but the medium through which each sculpture holds and alters the space around it.

The exhibition marks the first collaboration between Alexandre de Betak and Salon 94 Design founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, united by a shared instinct for work that moves freely between art and design. Greenberg Rohatyn says “Lit, and with synched sound, these are theater — figurative, grand, elegant performers. Unlit, they stand as sculpture — there’s an ambition and a monumentality to them, something of Tatlin’s Tower, or a David Smith. Alex has spent his career building structures that disappear into someone else’s spectacle. Here, for the first time, the structure is the whole point.”

It’s a symbolic return for de Betak, who is staging his first body of sculpture in the city which he called home for over two decades and where his acclaimed practice took shape. Alexandre de Betak, artist, says: “For many years, my job was to conceal this apparatus – to dress it, disguise it, make it vanish so something else could be seen. These trusses and stage lights lived in the rafters, holding the light, never receiving it. There’s something I find moving about that now: the most overlooked objects in the room were the ones making everything possible. The contrasts are the point: old and new, ephemeral and eternal, what’s hidden and what’s illuminated – I’m interested in the moment those things collide."