Hippolyte Hentgen at Villa du Parc – Centre d’art contemporain, Annemasse

The Villa du Parc presents a large-scale artistic project by the duo Hippolyte Hentgen, formed by French artists Lina Hentgen and Gaëlle Hippolyte. They are designing an in situ production, a monumental outdoor mural for the east facade of the art center, accompanied by a monographic exhibition throughout the interior spaces, entitled “Chambre à deux lits” (Twin Room).

The facades of the Villa du Parc are striking markers of the artistic identity of the art center in Parc Montessuit and the city of Annemasse. They are custom-designed works of art created to match the scale of the building’s architecture and installed for several years. Friselis, the new east facade created by Hippolyte Hentgen, replaces Christophe Cuzin’s iconic red work Léger décalage (2006) and plays off Aimée, the north facade created in 2021 by Swiss painter Renée Levi.

Hippolyte Hentgen’s project was unanimously selected from several designs commissioned from female artists in the French art scene. It is an opportunity for the duo, known and renowned for their drawing and collage work, to further develop their practice of spray-painted and flat-colored murals, which they have been working on in recent years. The jury was won over by their vibrant and colorful proposal in the wooded setting of the park, the interplay of echoes and nods to the architecture through the hybridization of decorative styles, and the optimistic, geometric and pop dynamic of their project, which is in keeping with their long-standing collaborative visual art.

The immersion into Hippolyte Hentgen’s prolific universe, remixing many references, continues inside the Villa du Parc, where the duo presents a wide range of their collages, murals, drawings, and sculptures, which will joyfully fill the space from June 28 to December 21, 2025. The succession of rooms provides an opportunity to display a range of varied, all-over series and plastic environments that Hippolyte Hentgen brings up to date and revisits in this domestic setting.

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BIOGRAPHIES

GAËLLE HIPPOLYTE

Born in 1977 in Perpignan

LINA HENTGEN

Born in 1980 in Clermont-Ferrand

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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.