Hippolyte Hentgen

Hippolyte Hentgen is an artist duo composed of Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen. Brought together under this fictitious name as a sphere of sharing and a tool for distancing the notion of author, the two artists explore a research territory mainly oriented towards the image. If their practice is anchored in drawing, they also venture into other fields of representation, such as performance, decor, film and sculpture. By appropriating the codes of comics and press drawings, they multiply the tones (burlesque, naive) and references (from Jim Shaw to cartoons from the 1930s, from underground to modernism, textile motifs to Japanese decorative papers) and revive by sliding and grafting, a mass visual culture. Drawing on the history of art as well as popular culture, they capture iconic images inscribed in the collective memory and reproduce them in a huge protean and composite collage, of great stylistic freedom. Cultural clichés, worn to the bone, begin a new life under the pen of Hippolyte Hentgen. Through a wide range of supports, formats and styles, the work flatters the retinal pleasure and never ceases to surprise with its colorful, funny, sometimes acerbic verve. The works of Hippolyte Hentgen benefit from numerous monographic exhibitions and have recently been exhibited at MAMAC, Nice, at the Festival Le Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, at the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne, and at the Festival Hors-Pistes, National Museum of Modern Art Centre Pompidou. Their works include among others, among the collections of the National Center of Plastic Arts (CNAP), Paris, the Museum of the Abbey Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine and many FRACs.