Annette Messager

Mains fantômes, 2023

Je t’aime je ne t’aime plus, 2022

Toi-moi, 2023

Main ghost, 2014

Rencontre, 2018

Love me or leave me, 2018

Corps à corps, 2016

Since the late 1960s, Annette Messager has used techniques such as taxidermy, cuddly toys, embroidered fabrics and cut-out photographs, to develop a universe capable of containing the many different identities she has given herself over the years — the collector, the storyteller, la Bricoleuse, the Cheater, etc. — and also capable of questioning the clichés traditionally associated with her dual status as woman and artist. Drawing on mythology, popular imagery and art brut, her drawings, sculptures and installations combine, humorously or with great seriousness, personal and universal narratives, and real or fictional representations of the self.

Annette Messager sees drawing as “a game”, and enjoys putting onto paper combinations of words, symbols and emblematic motifs from her repertoire, such as hands, skulls and spectral figures. Her drawings are a blend of the frightening and the ironic, tragedy and farce, combinations of hybrid creatures and anatomical metamorphoses. Like a silent spell or a magic formula, handwritten words merge with images to unfold stories of meetings, love and disappearance. Annette Messager says: “My drawings always feel like ghostly apparitions, with just a sheet of paper, blank spaces, ink, water... and pure chance”