Annette Messager

Born in Berck-sur-Mer, France, in 1943, Annette Messager lives and works in Malakoff, south of Paris.

 

Since the 1970s, her work has been marked by a pronounced formal and thematic heterogeneity, moving from the intimate to the fictional, from the social to the universal. Through the use of everyday materials and strategies of assemblage, collection, and theatrical staging, Messager has developed a deeply personal language encompassing construction, documents, language, objects, taxidermy, drawing, photography, textiles, embroidery, albums, sculpture, and installation.

 

Throughout her career, the artist has recurrently explored fairy tales, mythology, and the figure of the double, using memory and reminiscence as conceptual driving forces. Her hybrid forms establish affinities with traditions as diverse as the Romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, and the phantasmagoric, constructing poetic universes in which the narrative and the symbolic coexist with a strong emotional and critical charge.

 

Annette Messager has received some of the most significant distinctions in the international art world, including the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture in 2016 and the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2022), the Institut Giacometti, Paris (2018), the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern – IVAM (2018), the Villa Medici, Rome (2017), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney (2014), and K21, Düsseldorf (2014), among many others.

 

A major retrospective of her work was organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007. Messager’s work has been widely presented in museums and institutions across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania, consolidating her position as one of the key figures in contemporary international art.