| Annette Messager: The Messengers |
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| Written by Eva D. Grimaldi | ||||||
| Saturday, 02 May 2009 14:51 | ||||||
 LONDON The Hayward Gallery presents the first major UK retrospective of Annette Messager, widely regarded as one of Europe’s most important artists.
The exhibition, Annette Messager: The Messengers, traces the development of Messager’s work over the last four decades, from the intimate pieces of the early 1970s to the large and visually stunning installations of the past 15 years, including part of Casino, the Pinocchio-inspired sumptuous red and black silk spectacle for which Messager won the Golden Lion Award at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Walking through Messager's 40-year survey of work, there's a temptation to compile a checklist of feminist art stereotypes: there are sculptures made from woolly, craftsy materials associated with sewing, representations of the body as object and landscape galore, as well as images of the self fragmented as mother, artist, lover. In the works on show, yarn and soft-toys, or newspaper clippings, illustrations and black-and-white snapshot photography, are collaged or scrapbooked together into sculptural installations that appear as if they were part of a homemade museum or examples of do-it-yourself taxidermy. Like surrealist films or nonsense poems, the assemblages seldom make immediate sense, yet wind their way into memory and emotions. Annette Messager fragments images and language to explore the concept of fiction, the dialogue between individual and collective identity, and the social issues of normalcy, morality, and the role of women. In her work she forcefully illustrates the idea that all things - a child's beloved toy, a photograph, a piece of embroidery, a word with seemingly unambiguous meaning - can be transformed into objects of potent expression.
Early on in her career, Messager played with issues of identity. The Secret Room, a small sealed section of the gallery - which, we cannot enter - is full of diary notes, images cut from magazines, misogynistic terms for women embroidered on to fabric, and black-and-white photos from the early 1970s showing barbaric forms of beauty treatment. There is also a display of her “best” signatures, written over and over, in the manner of an adolescent schoolgirl practising her name in the back of a textbook. Annette Messager, self-described ‘Messenger’ wanders through life under a variety of guises. One moment a Practical Woman, the next a Collector, a Pedlar, a Trickster, Messager is a shifty, capricious subject, rootless as a nomad.
Over the last 15 years, Messager’s artistic practice has expanded from two-dimensional works to large-scale installations, many of which have moving elements. Her more recent installations have a theatrical aesthetic, evident in The Hayward exhibition with works such as Articulated-Disarticulated, 2001-2002, which was first shown at Documenta X, and Casino, first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Posing the question of what it means to be human, both in a physical and spiritual sense, Casino firmly establishes Messager’s place as one of the most compelling and prolific artists of our time.
At times humorous and playful, at times frightening and morbid, her works are characterised by a mixing of differing perspectives, challenging the viewer to look at the world anew and confront the fears and fantasies that lie beneath the surface of daily life. The exhibition was initially shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2007 where it attracted a record number of visitors and has since travelled to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea and the Mori Art Museum in Japan. Bookmark us: 
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 05 August 2009 08:28 |
