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Annette Messager

  • lsimonsart
  • Apr 19
  • 2 min read

Updated: May 4

“Annette Messager.” 2021. Wikipedia. March 2, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Messager.
“Annette Messager.” 2021. Wikipedia. March 2, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Messager.

Annette Messager was born in 1943 in Berck-sur-Mer, France. During the 1960’s she studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs (school of art and design) in Paris. From early on in her career she pushed back against traditional notions of what art should be. Instead of painting or sculpture in a classical sense, she began collecting, sewing, labelling, and playing with photography and soft materials. Throughout the years she developed a deeply personal, feminist, and fragmentary practice. Her work plays in the mess of identity, memory, femininity, and the complicated ways we try to hold ourselves together. It is full of contradictions. As noted in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s curatorial essay, “Messager’s works hover between the playful and the macabre, the personal and the political, the intimate and the public.”



“Annette Messager.” n.d. AWARE Women Artists / Femmes Artistes. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/annette-messager/.
“Annette Messager.” n.d. AWARE Women Artists / Femmes Artistes. https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/annette-messager/.

One of Messager’s most known works Mes Vœux (My Vows) is a great example. It is a circular suspended tangle of black and white photographs. These photographs consist of various body parts; hands, mouths, eyes, limbs, and private bodily areas. Each individual photo is labelled with a different wish. Some are sweet and innocent, whereas others are violent or brutally honest. Each component, when placed together, creates a map of a person that looks like they are being pulled and tugged in different directions.


The installation hangs like an odd shrine being for both prayer and confession. It not only feels deeply personal, but also universal. The partial depiction of people cant decide if it wants to connect, disappear, be seen, or escape. It allows contradictions to situate side by side, like separated body parts to don’t fit together anymore, yet still trying to be one.


At the core of her practice is a thematic framework built around these contradictions and fragmentations. She explores identity not as something that is fixed, but as something that is a shifting, unstable construct. Themes of gender and power also run throughout Messager’s work, as she repurposes domestic and stereotypical ‘feminine’ materials like sewing, fabric, and toys, questioning the cultural value of women’s labour and emotional lives.


To conclude, Annette Messager’s work is a profound exploration of the spaces between control and chaos, the self and the other. Her installations don’t offer easy resolutions, but instead invite the viewer to confront contradictions and complexities that make up our identity.




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