Annette Messager was born in Berck-sur-Mer in 1943. Since the late 1960s, she has been developing a personal world in which she takes on a whole range of identities - Collector, Trickster and Practical Woman among them – which enable her, not without humour, to unravel the clichés traditionally associated with her dual status as a woman and an artist. Creator of chimeras, lover of word games and hawker of dreams, she delights in unnerving the public by immersing it in a world marked by carnival and fairy tales, where familiar features (everyday objects, soft toys, items of clothing, photographs of the human body, etc.) reveal their potential strangeness.

Specially conceived by the artist, the Comme si (As If) exhibition will give pride of place to drawing, a technique dear to her heart, which enables her to create a language not unlike haikus, those concise, highly pictorial Japanese poems. Previously unseen creations include a selection of seventy-six new acrylic ink drawings from the Tête-à-tête (Face-to-face) series, which presents tragicomic variations on the human skull, like so many vanitases.

Drawing is omnipresent and will also be found in her recent installations, deployed on floors and walls alike and dialoguing with other, older works such as Faire des cartes de France (Making Maps of France), created in 2000, purchased by the LaM in 2006, and recently complemented by the acquisition of twenty-one drawings.

Among her recent works, Annette Messager will also be presenting Dessus-Dessous (Above-Below) for the first time – swathes of red fabric undulating above luminous sculptures, an installation that revisits the work she created for the French Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale (and for which she won the Golden Lion) – and La revanche des animaux (Revenge of the animals), a composite installation in which heads of soft toys are grafted onto objects and architectures covered in mat black paper.

This new exhibition invites its visitors to reappropriate their personal histories through fiction and creation, and realise that, despite appearances, we do everything as if…
 

Curatorship

Marie-Amélie Senot, Associate Curator for Modern Art and Contemporary Art, LaM
 

Discover the teaser of the exhibition