Hippolyte Hentgen

Hippolyte Hentgen is an artistic duo made up of Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen. Brought together under this fictitious name, which they consider as a space for their shared work as well as a means of distancing any notion of authorship, the two artists explore a field of research that mainly revolves around the image. While their practice is principally rooted in drawing, they also venture into other areas of representation such as performance, stage design, film and sculpture. Through their appropriation of the codes of the comic strip and cartoons from the press, they employ a wide range of tones (from the burlesque to the naïve) and references (from Jim Shaw to the cartoons of the 1930s, from the underground to modernism, from textile patterns to Japanese decorative paper) and by means of the transposition and grafting of images, have brought back to life a field of mass visual culture. Drawing on the history of art as well as popular culture, they seize upon iconic images anchored in the collective consciousness and render them in an immense protean and composite collage of great stylistic freedom. Cultural clichés, worn down to the bone, take on a new life under the pen of Hippolyte Hentgen. Employing a wide range of media, formats and styles, their work is pleasing to the eye, yet never ceases to surprise with its colorful, amusing and sometimes acerbic verve.

Hippolyte Hentgen's work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and has recently been exhibited at the MAMAC in Nice, the Printemps de Septembre Festival in Toulouse, at the Abbaye Sainte-Croix Museum in les Sables-d’Olonne and at the Hors-Pistes Festival at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Their work is held in the collections of the CNAP, Paris, the Abbaye Sainte-Croix Museum, Les Sables-d’Olonne, the MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine and numerous FRACs.