A retrospective of thirteen years of image production by the artist duo Hippolyte Hentgen.
The four-handed drawing practiced by Hippolyte Hentgen has gradually mutated into a practice of the image in the broadest sense: by collages, heterogeneous documentary borrowings ...
Imagier brings together thirteen years of production by the two artists, from 2009 to 2022. In the introduction, Claire Gilman explores the anti-hierarchical way in which Hippolyte Hentgen makes images. A long-term interview with Tony Côme then allows us to revisit their practice of collecting and quoting, and by implication, the historical conditions of the production of drawing. Finally, a contribution by
Jad Fair brings this generous monograph to a poetic close.
Hippolyte Hentgen is an artistic duo made up of French artists Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen (respectively born in 1977 and 1980). 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.
