HappenArt

Annette Messager

Visual artist
Location: France

The French artist Annette Messager, studied at the Decorative Arts in Paris. Then, she interrupted her studies on the eve of May 68 and brought together her first Collections. Albums of photographs and sentences taken from the press that she annotates and modifies.
The Germain gallery commissioned him in 1971-1972 to create a work with wool and fabric Les Pensionnaires, which consists of an alignment of sparrows stuffed and swaddled in knitwear covered with fabric.

70’s.

Developing in the Parisian context of the 1970s, the work of Annette Messager, close to that of artists such as Boltanski, Le Gac, Sarkis, or Paul-Armand Gette, stems from these singular approaches qualified as “individual mythologies”. Hostile to any academicism, as also to an extreme politicization that followed May 68. These artists advocate taking into account the affective, imaginary, even nostalgic element in the work.

Feminine dimension.

Annette Messager, who asserts the feminine dimension of her art. Integrates the domestic universe in which the male gaze has confined the woman. Needlework, preciously intimate notebooks. rRviews of beauty, to make it its plastic language at the same time as a critique of the feminine condition. From Pensionnaires, 1972. to Mes Petites Effigies, 1988. Aux Piques, 1992, his work is fond of the aesthetics of the fragment and reveals an intimate universe listening to the contradictory movements of the unconscious.

Golden Lion.

In 2005, she received the Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Biennale for her work Casino. A retrospective was dedicated to him by the Center Pompidou in 2007 followed by a second in 2012 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg.