Gaëlle Hippolyte & Lina Hentgen

Hippolyte Hentgen, a fictional character born out of the collaboration between two women artists, plays at manipulating shared visual codes.

Behind Hippolyte Hentgen are the artists Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen. Their work revolves around truisms, shared images and identifiable codes. Borrowing from comic strips, animation and cartoons, Hippolyte Hentgen investigates popular imagery by doing: drawing as a means of understanding drawing and grasping its power and potentialities. The result is a vast, referential, protean, composite collage that stays anchored in the collective memory.

Ghosts have been ingrained in Japanese folklore since the Edo period. Hippolyte Hentgen’s project focused on the iconography of the ghost and its circulation in printed form. The collection and selection of documents is seen as an artistic gesture, forming an archive of this haunted world from its origins in Kiso painting to the drawings of today. This archive would later serve as the basis for a mockup and, ultimately, publication. The duo’s project also included production of animated films. Research into senga eiga (early Japanese animated films) pinpointed their graphic and narrative attributes, to develop a studio practice adapted to locally sourced materials and inspired by local crafts.