Postcard A5 Annette Messager – The Surgery

Product detailed description

This postcard presents a selected motif from the work of Annette Messager, the French artist who for more than fifty years has been creating a world in which tenderness meets unease. From ordinary materials – fabrics, toys, photographs and stuffed animals – she builds fragile monuments to memory, identity and desire.

The postcard was created for the exhibition Annette Messager: Tragikomedie, which at Kunsthalle Praha traces the main thematic strands of her work across five decades. The tension between care and violence, order and chaos, humour and sorrow challenges the usual ways in which we represent the body, gender and emotional experience.

The postcard is a simple way to take a piece of the exhibition with you – whether you send it on or keep it as a small reminder of an encounter with contemporary art.

Annette Messager

Annette Messager is a French artist whose practice brings together installation, drawing, collage, photography and object-making. She represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, and her work has been shown at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, MoMA in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London.

Throughout her career she has explored the body, gender, desire and memory. Her early works examine systems of control and stereotypes associated with women; from the 1980s she developed new ways of depicting the female figure – witches, monsters, heroines and protesters – often with humour and gentle subversion.

Her work is defined by tension between opposites – care and violence, order and chaos, playfulness and unease. In doing so, it invites us to look anew at what we take for granted.