calendario eventi  :: 

X

5/6/2007

Annette Messager

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Les messagers

curator Sophie Duplaix

A major figure in international contemporary art, Annette Messager represented France at the Venice Biennale of 2005, where she won the Golden Lion.

Here she takes over the gallery space with her astonishing and affecting repertoire of forms and materials (among them soft toys, stuffed animals, fabrics, wool, photographs and drawings), mixing registers and playing with remarkable virtuosity on our senses and feelings.
The exhibition presents a panoramic survey of her work, from the intimate pieces of the early 1970s to the very large installations of 1990 to the present, in which movement comes to play an increasingly important role. The non-chronological display sets the works into dialogue, bringing out tensions and affinities, the play of lyricism and gravity.

The artist has created an especially spectacular piece for the Forum, and is also responsible for the striking design of the Centre's annual pass for 2007, celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Annette Messager's artistic universe, which draws on popular imagery, on "art brut" and high art, articulates a subtle duality that provokes mixed feelings of both attraction and repulsion.

Coming into the Centre Pompidou, visitors cannot fail to be struck by the astonishing ballet of the artist's installation in the Forum, La Ballade de Pinocchio à Beaubourg. Enclosed in big black nets, human body parts in leatherette seem to be falling through the entrance foyer towards the floor below, where a heap of bolsters awaits them. Enclosed in a ring, the jumble on the floor has a little wooden figure reclining lazily on one of the bolsters: this is Pinocchio, whose dream of becoming a human being seems be enacted before our eyes.

In front of the exhibition, the fabric silhouettes of La Ballade des pendus (2002), suspended from a rail on the ceiling, swing through space like the figures of a merry-go-round, bobbing and swaying in macabre procession.

The visitor then enters the exhibition through a corridor in which is installed Eux et nous, nous et eux (2000), an arrangement of mirrors suspended horizontally above, supporting a number of stuffed animals, their heads, as if grafted on, covered in a "mask" of plush. Ones own reflection combines with the sight of these ambiguous creatures, that have something of both life and death.

The exhibition proper begins with two highlights of the artist's first period, in the early 1970s, Les Pensionnaires and the Albums-Collections, in which already she embarks on the interrogation of identity that has always been a central concern to her, as an artist and as a woman. In Les Pensionnaires – a little flock of stuffed birds which the artist looks after, dresses up, watches over and tells off, as if they were her children – the rôle of the mother is put into question in a manner both comic and deadly serious. In the Albums-collections, Messager takes fragments of daily reality, working them over with obsessional industry and attention to detail in paltry little notebooks that describe a stereotypically female universe of dreams and fantasies, duty and submission. They are assembled here in a "secret room" whose interior is visible only through a number of slits in the walls.

The works of the 1980s, more theatrical in effect, are wall-mounted. Chimères (1982-84) offers monstrous and fantastical images developed from torn and painted photographs. Mes Trophées (1986-88), large photographs hung on the wall like paintings, are scattered with pieces of arm and leg, eyes and breasts, all adorned with a costly decoration that gives these disjecta membra the air of votive offerings.

The body is omnipresent in Messager's work, appearing in multiple fragments, as in the accumulation of suspended photographs of Mes Voeux (1988-90), the hair of Mes Voeux avec nos cheveux, or in the plush versions of Mes petites Effigies (1988) and again, later, of Les Restes (1998-2000), wall-mounted displays of body parts in plush.

The installations of the 1990s, the first being Les Piques (1991-93), tend to make a more all-embracing use of space. In the impressive Dépendance-Indépendance (1995-1996), stuffed fabric elements suggesting organs hang among words in the same materials, threads of coloured wool and nets holding objects of uncertain form, inviting the viewer to the consider the unimpressive sum of the parts. In En Balance (1998), unravelled wool threads through space like a blood network.

The environment Articulés-désarticulés (2001-2002), shown at Documenta XI in Kassel, is the work in which Messager first introduces movement: puppet-automata of gesticulate above forms inert as wrecks suggestive of some disaster. Movement is explored again in Casino, a work inspired by the character Pinocchio, made for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2005, rendered unrecognizable for the occasion. The central installation, the heart of this exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, uses a blower to set an immense red sail into wave-like motion, both beautiful and disturbing. The question of breath is again explored in a recent work, Gonflés-Dégonflés (2006), a jungle of organs, skin and fluids that "breathes" in cyclical movement, blurring the boundary of inside and out in a grotesque parody of something of ourselves.

After the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition travels in late 2007 to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, in 2008 to the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (Japan) and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (Korea), and in 2009 to the United Kingdom.

PUBLICATION
Les Messagers Catalogue Format: 170 x 240 H/b, 608 pp., 500 col. ills Copublished by the Centre Pompidou and Xavier Barral

AT THE SAME TIME AT THE CENTRE:

AIRS DE PARIS
25 April - 20 August 2007

PRIX MARCEL DUCHAMP 2006
PHILIPPE MAYAUX
10 May - 15 August 2007

PRESS OPENING
Monday 4th June from 11am to 3pm

Centre Pompidou
75191 Paris cedex 04
Opening hours
The exhibition is open every day except Tuesdays, from 11am to 9pm
Admissions
10 euros, reduced-price tickets: 8 euros
metro
Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau

stampa

permanent link