Hippolyte Hentgen
Hippolyte Hentgen - color me, 2016
Série n°1
Semiose éditions
Hippolyte Hentgen would have us believe he's a man, but in truth, there are two women behind the name: Gaëlle (Hippolyte) and Lina (Hentgen), which makes two smart brains and four agile hands. Give them a pencil and they can and will draw anything: Mickey Mouse, King Kong, hairy monsters or monsters with no clothes at all, even Santa Claus with an oversized nose, all in an insane mix of styles. This coloring book is their first work for children and they've put together some crazy scenes for you to color using one, two, three or even four hands!
Hippolyte Hentgen
Born in 1977 and 1980, Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen live and work in Paris. United under the name Hippolyte Hentgen, they form a double-headed entity enjoying, by advance agreement, total stylistic liberty. Their intensive and sometimes invasive use of drawing (in both black & white and colour) coexists with their work in acrylic, fabric, volume and stage sets. Their oeuvre swings between the two and the three-dimensional, mixing stylistic tones (from burlesque to naïve) and references (from Jim Shaw to 1930s cartoons, from underground to modernism). Surrealist pin-ups, extra-terrestrial monsters of all shapes and sizes with all-conquering hairstyles, all help to inject life, by means of association and transformation, into visual mass-culture.
Their work was exhibited at the Pavillion Carré de Baudoin in Paris (2014), at the 40mcube in Rennes (2013), at the Semiose Gallery in Paris (2012 and 2014), at the Centre Pompidou (2015) and at the Artothèque de Pessac (2015). It also features in the collections of the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine, of the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain and the Champagne-Ardennes, Limousin, Corsica and Normandie FRACs. A solo exhibition of their works will take place in 2017 at the CAC La Traverse in Alfortville.