Annette Messager

Annette Messager (*1943, Berck) is a French artist who for more than fifty years has been creating a world in which tenderness meets unease. From the most ordinary things – fabrics, toys, photographs and stuffed animals – she builds fragile monuments to memory, identity and desire. In her hands, familiar objects take on a new, strangely unsettling character. 

Her practice brings together installation, drawing, collage, photography and object-making. Her early works examine systems of control, classification and stereotypes associated with women, often with humour and gentle subversion. From the 1980s she has developed new ways of depicting the female figure – witches, monsters, heroines and protesters – and in her most recent works she returns to the body through its traces and absence. Across the decades she holds on to the tension between opposites: care and violence, order and chaos, humour and sorrow.

Messager represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, MoMA in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London. Her work is currently presented in the extensive solo exhibition Annette Messager: Tragicomedy at Kunsthalle Praha.