< input > #2

Born in Limoges in 1981, he is represented by Valeria Cetraro gallery (Paris). He took part in the Ricard Foundation Prize in 2014.

A self-publisher and graphzine artist, Hendrik Hegray is a master of the trivial and the bizarre, and in recent years his work has focused on blurring the lines, both aesthetically and conceptually. Ease, comfort, and compromise are his immediate enemies. Over the years, Hegray has taken his pictorial practice into other realms, moving away from comics to turn into a noise performer, conceptual sculptor, achromatic painter, brutalist collagist, assembly-line photocopier, Italo disco DJ, experimental videographer, or bulimic cinephile (note that he shares his initials with Howard Hawks, no doubt a sign of destiny). In one word: unclassifiable. A provocative agent in constant opposition to the world around him. He cultivates collisions of antinomic references whose aggressiveness, sarcasm, and outrageous bad taste mask a form of modesty, not exempted from romanticism.

Deliberately abstruse, Hegray's art never offers itself in the obviousness of a signifier, but rather constantly condemns itself to maximizing incongruity and inscribing impediment in its pictorial gestures, without ever yielding to the ease of expression or any kind of savoir-faire. Making it a point of honour to perplexing and disconcerting his audience, he constantly renews his creative process in a simultaneous gesture of destruction and edification, carelessness, and rigor. Weary of the crass stupidity with which this era fills us, Hegray persists in turning the knife in the wound, where it hurts and where laughter explodes into discomfort. Yet his sense of the grotesque and the absurd does not prevent beauty and poetry from intruding into his works, which seem to follow in the footsteps of both Philip Guston and Cy Twombly.

Julien Bécourt, May 2023

Curated by Julien Bécourt, <input> is a program celebrating the union between the visual and sound arts. From museum installations to underground activism, from Fluxus to noise music, Bécourt will invite a visual artist to reflect on his or her relationship with the resonance and vibration of sound, and to question the sacred bond that the arts have always forged with music - be it minor or major, popular or learned.