Messager, Annette

French, b. 1943

BiographyAnnette Messager combines photographs, text, taxidermy, textiles, and paintings to create hybrid images, sculptures, and installations that subvert traditional definitions of visual art. Her conceptual, feminist practice centers an ongoing exploration of tension—whether between the individual and the collective or reality and fiction—paying special attention to the way these tension shape conventional perceptions of women. Through an interpolation of principles of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Surrealism, Messager’s work is marked with a sense of creative expansion and rebellious playfulness. “The artist occupies the place of the mischievous little girl who lies dormant in all of us,” she told Bomb Magazine in the late 1980s.

The images in the MoCP permanent collection are in the same spirit of her transitional series Les Indices (Clues), 1980-81. Each image is a fragment of a tightly composed, hand-colored, and spliced photograph taken by Messager. Repeated imagery of body parts, random objects, and weapons evoke the dramatic ambiguity of crime scenes. This fragmented motif is an early iteration of the series that followed, Chimères (Chimaeras, 1982).

Annette Messager was encouraged by her father, a photographer and amateur painter, to pursue art from an early age. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1962 to 1966. Messager states that she found her voice as an artist in 1971 after stepping on a dead sparrow in the streets of Paris. This encounter inspired her first major exhibition The Boarders (1972) which was a series of posed, taxidermized sparrows wearing hand-knit sweaters. Since then, she has exhibited her work extensively. In 2005, she won the Golden Lion Award while representing France Venice Biennale. Messager has had major retrospective exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2022); Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary, and Outsider Art (2021), Villenueve d’Ascq, France; Centre Pompidou (2007), Paris; and Museum of Modern Art (1996), New York.