Hippolyte Hentgen is an artistic partnership between French artists Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen who operate under this fictitious name in order to create a space for their shared work and to blur or remove all notions of authorship relating to it. Imagier collects thirteen years of output from this fascinating contemporary art entity.
The Hippolyte Hentgen canon is mainly centred on the image and principally rooted in drawing, but the duo have also practiced in areas such as performance, stage design, film and sculpture. Their work characteristically appropriates comic strip and cartoon/graphic media, employing a wide range of tones, references and historical stylings, from the underground to modernism, from the clichéd to the iconic, to address and revitalise a very broad field of field of mass visual culture.
Imagier contains an introduction by Claire Gilman exploring the anti-hierarchical way in which Hippolyte Hentgen create their images, an interview with Tony Côme that examines their practice of collecting and quotation, and a contribution by musician and artist Jad Fair to bring the monograph to a close.
Le Lait, Albi and L'Artothèque, 224pp, 34cm x 22cm, French/English text, hardcover, 2023