While the traditional bourgeois concept of art frames the artist as an isolated genius mediating a unique perception of the world to communicate with viewers’ solitary minds, art is truly and inescapably a social practice deeply embedded in historical, material, and collective relations. Art is inescapably communal, as it implies and necessitates the presence of other people. I believe art’s roots lie in the human practices of prayer and dance, rituals and gatherings. Consider the Upper Paleolithic cave art of Lascaux painted deep inside dark, subterranean spaces. As anthropologists and art historians note, these cave paintings were intimately tied to ritual performance, magic, and sacred gathering. They were spaces where image, movement, sound, and communal intent intersected.
This ritualistic understanding of art rooted in relationality finds a parallel in the work of contemporary German artist Benedikt Hipp. Raised in a traditional craft environment producing wax votive offerings, Hipp’s work often begins from the ritual, sacred action, and material transformation. His paintings and ceramic works explicitly recall prehistoric, sacred sites where body parts and organic forms merge. Open Cluster takes cues from a choreography of all living beings into a “singular plural” narrative, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). By staging a choreography where body parts, organic matters, and architectural fragments merge on wooden surfaces, Hipp collapses the Western illusion of the self-contained individual. For Nancy, the "singular" is indeed never isolated; it exists only in its exposure to the "plural." Hipp manifests this "being-with" by transforming the human body into a shared, cosmic landscape where fragments serve as wholes as boundaries between the self and the world dissolve, through Hipp’s coordinates. He leverages a metaphor for collective existence. Just as an open cluster consists of hundreds of stars born from the same parent molecular cloud – each evolving into a unique celestial body while remaining gravitationally and historically bound – Hipp’s constellation of body parts, organic matter, and architectural remnants mirrors this shared origin: individual fragments act as self-contained entities that exist only through their dynamic, relational balance with the whole.
The newly produced series of panel paintings like Open the Door and Close the Window, Molekülwolke and You Wake Up and You Know Where You’re Going To offer a new domain of understanding of the artist’s oeuvre. By rendering architectural structures as stark, black-and-white grids, these works bridge the expansive gestures of Abstract Expressionism with a counter tone of a somber atmosphere of an invisible circumstance of uncertainty. The compositions pair rigid geometric lines with subtle surrealistic undertones, casting the viewer into a muted, twilight landscape – a pervasive crepuscolo that strips these architectural spaces of immediate temporal anchors. The monochrome frameworks act as skeletal grids, imposing order onto chaotic spatial fields, while the atmospheric weight transforms concrete forms into psychological spaces, blurring the line between physical structure and memory. This aesthetic gloom serves as a vehicle for a conceptio post-factum – a conceptualization that arrives in the aftermath of an event. The artist does not attempt to anticipate or participate in the historical moment as it unfolds; rather, the creative act takes place when the process and time span of history has already drawn to a close.
This retrospective stance directly invokes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s famous philosophical metaphor from Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821):
„Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.“
("The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.")
Just as philosophy, in these terms, achieves understanding only when a form of life has grown old, these panel paintings operate in the metaphorical dusk of time. The black-and-white grids depict the distilled conceptual remains of a lived environment as backdrop on new organic forms to materialise into metaphysical forms.
In Impaktit and ION, the monumental, enigmatic presence of the composition reinterprets De Chirico’s alienated, metaphysical mannequins. These human busts merge organically with the rigid black-and-white interfaces of architectures as hinting to the singular plural dimension of existence: all were made in the interiors of collapsing stars as much as Hipp’s ceramic meteorite-like sculpture suggests. Sculpted from earth and wild clay and wood fired over a days-long process, the ceramic piece sits in the gallery space like an ancient, fallen celestial body. Its pitted, organic texture evokes both prehistoric ritual relics and extraterrestrial matter, grounding the abstract cosmic metaphor in physical presence. This ceramic form then directly invades the two-dimensional plane of Giant Molecular Cloud, where a painted fragment of this exact meteorite appears suspended, looming over the image space. One could understand the meteorite as a sign of a higher celestial interconnectedness, grounded by the evocative concept of Ba-en-pet. As an Ancient Egyptian term for "iron or stone from the sky," Ba-en-pet – the ancient Egyptian definition of “metal of heaven” of “meteor” – acts as a bridge between terrestrial and cosmic matter: it begins as ignites in mid-air (metéōros, thus meteors) as a streak of light, and ultimately crashes down to merge with the earth. In Hipp’s staging, the wooden surfaces become the site of this cosmic landing. The organic and architectural fragments function like meteoritic remnants: foreign yet ancient material that disrupts the flat surface of the ordinary, blurring the distinction between what is "above" (the ideal, sky, cosmic) and what is "below" (the earthly, bodily, physical).
Critic Jill Johnston once wrote
“relating is connecting conveying transmitting conducting moving bearing relaying etc and that’s what we’re doing all the time. re- is an inseparable particle which means again. back. anew. against.”
And so I feel when prompted to introduce Hipp’s artworks and world-views. In Hipp’s language of symbols, art is precisely this perpetual act of relaying: an ongoing ritual that binds the individual fragment to the collective whole and the mundane to the farthest reaches of the sky.
Ilaria Sponda
In his artistic practice, Benedikt Hipp works across a wide range of media, including ceramics, painting, and video. He grew up in a traditional family workshop producing votive offerings in wax, where serially produced representations of body parts were part of his everyday environment. From an early age, he began to engage with the human body himself. To this day, he explores the body as fragment, hybrid entity, emergent system, and site of ritual and social action. At the heart of his practice is an inquiry into the ways in which the human body is perceived and transformed, as well as its inherent vulnerability and transience. Hipp’s new monograph “Songs from the Orbs“, brings together works and exhibitions from recent years, placing a particular emphasis on his ceramic practice and the works he produces in the two high-temperature wood-fired kilns he built himself.
Benedikt Hipp (*1977, Munich) lives and works in Finning. Since 2007, his work has been presented in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at Emil Schumacher Museum, Hagen, the Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach, Haus der Kunst, Munich, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Kunstpalais Erlangen, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen.
In 2020/21, Hipp was awarded the Rome Prize and a residency at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo. During his time there, he developed permaculture projects dedicated to enhancing biodiversity within the gardens of Villa Massimo.