ART CITIES:N.York-Annette Messager
Annette Messager has an extensive body of work, for over 4 decades she encompasses drawing, photography, needlework, sculpture and installation. Messager’s works include a wide choice of materials, also the Images are culled from popular magazines and newspapers, drawn by hand or photographed, while particular words are repeated over and over, like a litany.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
Annette Messager in her exhibition “Daily” at Marian Goodman gallery in New York, creates a dramatic incursion into the space with her installation, a monumental work presented in conjunction with her recent works, “Le crabe cancer”, “Le bras chaussure”, “En equilibre”, “L’oiseau”, “Jambes oiseau”, and new “Pole Dance” drawings, which are shown in the adjacent room. These works provide a platform for a reinvention of her practice of creating hybrid forms drawn from personal memory and daily life, inspired by fiction and fantasy. As Messager says, “For me, the fantastic is in daily life; real life is more extraordinary than all of the imagination”. From the 1970s onward, Annette Messager’s work has been known for an heterogeneity of form and subject matter, ranging from the personal to the fictional, the social to the universal. Through an embrace of everyday materials, and principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical display, her diverse media has included construction, documents, language, objects, taxidermy, drawings, photographs, fabric, embroidery, image collections, albums, sculpture and installation. Early works were based on hand made objects, itemized inventories, notebooks, journals, and invented scenarios in relation to childhood and the domestic. Messager has explored fairy tales, mythology and doppelgangers throughout her œuvre. Large scale works such as “Casino”, inspired by Pinocchio’s quest to become a human boy, and which won the Golden Lion Award at the 51st Venice Biennal, draws from a shared public mythology. Other works, such as “Motion/Emotion” or “Inflated/Deflated”, incorporate motion and the kinetic via pneumatic devices. Both are examples of Messager’s multiplicity in large scale installation works. Her expansive installations give us hybrid forms in dramatic formation or suspension, tableaux vivants which transform physical space and provide immersive experiences to the viewer.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, New York, Duration: 1-30/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://mariangoodman.com
