1133 - Capitule 8

Hipkiss is the joint pseudonym of Alpha and Christopher Mason (both born in 1964 in the UK), who have been working together since their first meeting in the early 1980s. British by birth, they have lived in France since 2001 and consider themselves Anglo-French.   

The two artists left the English countryside to stay in the south of France. The intimate collaboration of the two artists results in constructed landscapes within which there is a mix of women-men and strange insects at the centre of an environment that is very industrial. Fragments of texts, words chosen at hazard, slip into the meticulous drawings of Hipkiss, which on a superficial backdrop reveal political messages. The drawings of Hipkiss form notably a part of the collection of Cindy Sherman and Antoine de Galbert and, in addition, that of the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum (The Netherlands).

In 2018, the solo exhibition, ‘Bulwark’, at The Drawing Center, New York, marked a new stage in their ongoing Towers project. Moving on from the more industrial compositions of 2015-16, they created an installation of thirteen towering plants – mostly toxic or prickly species – envisaged by the artists as a small battalion of ‘Liberties’.

Hipkiss is represented in the collections of FRAC Picardie, FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Cindy Sherman, Rudolf Zwirner, Antoine de Galbert, The Kupferstichkabinett and The Whitworth, among others. The work has been shown at Tate Britain, Whitechapel, David Zwirner, The Drawing Center, La Maison Rouge, New Museum, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, La Caixa and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.