Gaëlle Hippolyte
Born in 1977 in Perpignan

Lina Hentgen
Born in 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand

Hippolyte Hentgen
Since 2007 in Paris

Hippolyte Hentgen is an artist duo formed by Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen. United under this fictitious name, intended as a space for sharing and a means of distancing themselves from the notion of authorship, the two artists explore a field of research primarily focused on the image. While their practice is rooted in drawing, they also venture into other fields of representation, such as performance, set design, film, and sculpture. By appropriating the codes of comic books and press cartoons, they multiply the tones (burlesque, naive) and references (from Jim Shaw to 1930s cartoons, from underground to modernism, from textile motifs to Japanese decorative papers) and revive visual mass culture through shifts and grafts. Drawing on art history and popular culture, they take iconic images from the collective memory and recreate them in a huge, protean, composite collage with great stylistic freedom. Cultural clichés, worn out to the bone, take on a new life under the pen of Hippolyte Hentgen. Through a wide range of media, formats and styles, the work delights the eye and never ceases to surprise with its colorful, funny and sometimes acerbic verve.
Hippolyte Hentgen’s works have been featured in many solo exhibitions and were recently displayed at the MAMAC in Nice, the Printemps de Septembre Festival in Toulouse, the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix in Les Sables-d’Olonne, and the Hors-Pistes Festival at the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou. Their works are included in the collections of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) in Paris, the Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix in Les Sables-d’Olonne, the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine, and many regional contemporary art collections. They have been represented by the Bernard Jordan Gallery in Paris since 2024.
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The Villa du Parc exhibited Hippolyte Hengen’s series of drawings Sentimental Adrift in the group exhibition Terrible Two in 2013, and Documents, at ArtGeneve, in 2015.