ART CITIES:Paris-Annette Messager
Annette Messager has been making art since the late ‘60s, combining and transforming materials in order to question established hierarchies and ideologies. Her background includes training at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs but she abandoned traditional ideas about art early in her career. Messager’s work moves between the quietly conceptual and the wildly expressionistic, is unabashedly and consistently anarchistic in its insistence on abandoning rationality.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive
Annette Messager with her solo exhibition “À mon seul désir” inaugurates Marian Goodman gallery’s new space, after theexhibition, the space will be relaunched as Librairie Marian Goodman, combining a street-front bookshop with a small gallery project space. The artist disregards accepted meanings and mixes sources and forms “Conceptual Art interests me in the same way as the art of the insane, astrology, and Religious Art. It’s not the ideologies which these areas perpetuate [that] interest me: they are for me, above all else, repertories of forms. I make fun of sorcery and alchemy even if I make full use of their signs….” In the exhibition Annette Messager presents a body of recent acrylic drawings, small sculptures, works on canvas from the series “My Relics” 1984-86), as well as Collection Albums from the series “Annette Messager Truqueuse” (1974) containing black and white photographs. By appropriating the manifesto “À mon seul désir” Messager immerses us again in the textual enigma adorning the sixth tapestry of “The Lady and the Unicorn”, The six tapestries were woven in Flanders from designs drawn in Paris around 1500.The set, is considered one of the greatest artworks of the Middle Ages in Europe. Five of the tapestries are commonly interpreted as depicting the five senses (taste, hearing, sight, smell, and touch) the sixth displays the words “À mon seul désir” (My One Desire). One thing is clear, that women’s desire and especially their ability to openly express it, continues to be met with resistance, and is being held back. It is either kept silent or is inaudible. Through her drawings as well as with her sculptures composed of a variety of darker elements, Messager offers a partial response to this issue. The phrase, “À mon seul désir” coupled with text incorporated directly into some of her drawings becomes a manifesto of women’s pride and the freedom to create and to show art, but also the right to choose and act according to her personal pleasure, desire and will. The new set of sculpture further demonstrates Messager’s continual use of fragmented bodies as well as the creation of works compsed of otherwise unrelated objects. Annette Messager takes an inner journey to the core of femininity, braving uncanny or even taboo aspects of it. At the same time, the recurrent possessive adjective in her work designates the nearly limitless number of fictional personalities she could invent since the creation of such works as “Annette Messager Collector” (1971), “Trickster” (1975), “Artist” (1976-80), “Peddler” (1982-84), etc.
Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 66 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 9/12/16-14/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com
