Annette Messager
(1943 - ) |
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work pertaining to toys and childhood Art Work
| Name: |
Annette Messager |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Berk, France |
| Nationality: |
French |
| Birth: |
1943 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
work pertaining to toys and childhood |
| Medium: |
photographs, prints and drawings, and various materials. |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Photography
Printmaking
Drawing |
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Biography
Emerging from the intellectual ferment of 1960s Paris, Annette Messager refused to be confined to conventional fine art media, choosing to work instead with 'bricolage'. Paintings, drawings and photographs were juxtaposed with collected images and objects, often incorporating needlework and knitting, and assembled in albums and boxes. Messager's use of 'feminine' craft-based skills led to criticism that she was defining women's art, derogatorily, as decorative.
Along with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Robert Gober (fellow exhibitors in Corpora! Politics held at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1992-3), Messager has reinvented the representation of the body. Far from perfect and on display, Messager's bodies are fractured, and even sometimes completely absent. In the eighty-six photographs Les Tortures Voluntaires (Voluntary Tortures) (1972), she focused on the painful, damaging beauty 'treatments' women undergo. The body has disappeared completely in Histoire des Robes (Story of Dresses) (1991). All that remains are garments in glass coffins, conveying the social significance of dress, and also the separation of bodily adornments from the humans who inhabited them. Messager has depicted sexual fantasies in her series Mes Dessins Secrets (My Secret Drawings).
More recently, Messager has shifted her sights to childhood. Her Effigies of the late 1980s and 1990s are installations made from discarded toys and clothes. They hauntingly evoke the waste, wear and shedding of past selves that is a part of growing, a far cry from cliched images of childhood innocence and beauty. Les Piques (The Pikes) (1992-3) also incorporates toys, impaled on a forest of poles. Maps behind them plot today's world, lacerated by conflict, a forceful indictment of global politics. Messager's work appeared with that of Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Moffatt, Cindy Sherman and Rosemarie Trockel (among other artists) in the exhibition Presumes Innocents: L'art contemporain et I'enfance (Presumed Innocent: Contemporary Art and Childhood) at the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2000. |
Samples of Work
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