On the occasion of his second solo show at MONITOR, the Amsterdam/Munich-based artist Benedikt Hipp will present a series of new works thought out for the gallery’s spaces, creating a new synergy between his pictorial pieces and the installation aspect of a body of sculptures realised in collaboration with the artist Lisa Reitmeier.

Abisso Calipso, the evocative title of the show inspired by the deepest submarine territory in Mediterranean sea, seeks to create a dialogue between the works in the two spaces of the gallery through scientific, environmental and social reflections, together with an orchestrated grouping of elements.

While the left gallery is dedicated to the interpretation of the origin of life itself, where sculpture and painting come together in the large immersive installation ‘Geological Heartbeat’, the gallery to the right propels us to the present day where the works reference modernist utopias, questioning laws of taxonomy, and a reflection on human condition.

Hipp’s work eludes the distinction between the abstract and figurative and is often influenced by mysterious and atavistic votive figures, invariably present in his artistic research and personal history. Here they are revealed by the anthropomorphic figures present in several paintings and in objects which recall sacrificial altars and votive offerings.

What emerges is a multi-layered oeuvre which seeks to represent the origins of natural life, but also the processes of transformation and proliferation of other forms of life. At the centre of everything, man (the anthropos) is the source of his progressive destiny but also of his inescapable downfall.