Mañana: Boris Hoppek | Delimbo Sevilla

Boris Hoppek let us come into his provocative world in his first exhibition at the Delimbo gallery in Seville with a selection of unpublished works carried out during the last year including installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs.

Boris Hoppek (born 1970, in Kreuztal) is a German contemporary artist based in Barcelona. His artistic roots lie in graffiti, but today his work spans painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation art. His work has been used in advertising campaigns as well.

Hoppek’s trademark is a symmetric oval, which appears in most of his work either alone or in a constellation of three, thus forming a face. He is the creator of The C’Mons, a fictional rock band at the centre of a viral marketing campaign for the fourth-generation Opel Corsa car. In 2010 he was named as one of the leading figures in urban art by Patrick Nguyen in his book Beyond the Street.

In his works he continuously de-contextualised iconographic figures, taking them to a level of abstraction that allows him to address explicit political themes, such as immigration, racism, violence and sexuality. This interest also dominates his photographic work, which is pornography with a twist, the women always one step away from being objectified outright.

Creator of the famous character known as «Bimbo», which is not offensive at all in Spanish culture, is highly controversial in many countries for the simple fact of constituting a black figure with red lips (known as «Blackface»), as it is considered racist. It is because of that the artist turned this iconic image into his most recognizable icon, from which departs to tell impossible stories.