CONTEMPORARY ART SINCE 1999

Hybert’s art ranges from drawings, paintings and objects to installations, performances, travelling public artworks and videos. Since the mid-80s, his considerable output has evolved as a constantly proliferating lattice, a network of autonomous but related pieces whose goal is to represent the proliferation of thought itself.

For several years Hybert has produced a series of ‘Prototypes d’objects en fonctionnement’ (prototypes of working objects), or POFs. These sculptures are often wry mutations of banal everyday objects. ‘Swing’ (POF No.3, 1990) is a variation of a playground swing with the addition of two phallic protuberances on the seat, one hard, one soft. ‘Roof-Ceiling’ (POF No.10, 1995) consists of a mechanical device which vacuums up the rubbish in a room and deposits it in a transparent ceiling overhead; installed in a hairdressing salon, it allows the viewer’s newly sheared locks to become part of the architecture.

Hybert offer these objects as sites of fluid and shifting meaning. Viewers can interact with them to explore alternative and unlikely ‘uses’. To encourage this kind of participation, the POF are employed as probs in short videos featuring Hybert’s collaborator, Elian Pine Carrington, a flamboyant transvestite whose improvisational abilities lend these ‘tests’ a surreal and absurd quality.