Annette Messager Solo Exhibition "Lost Bodies and Tidy Your Room"

A magical detail from "Tidy Your Room," object installation, 2007-2009. Annette Messager's solo exhibition "Lost Bodies and Tidy Your Room" is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery from September 5 to October 10. Born in 1943, Annette Messager is a leading female figure in contemporary French art and the most internationally recognized female artist in France since the 1970s. Like Christian Boltanski and Jean Le Gac, she draws her artistic inspiration from non-mainstream subcultures. She exhibits a sensibility similar to Boltanski and Le Gac, expressing a comparable taste. However, as a female artist, she naturally builds upon women's sensitivity, delicacy, capability, and emotional depth.

Annette Messager has always maintained diverse creative forms (painting, drawing, embroidery, crafts, photography, sculpture, objects, installations, etc.). In recent years, she frequently creates dramatic monumental object and environmental space installations, mixing scenes of play and tragedy to create dialogue through similarity and tension. Her artistic world borrows from extraordinary folk imagery and ingenious craftsmanship, presented in series. The works interconnect and often develop new sensations from internal elements; their innovative language is directly rooted in our ordinary daily lives, making them understandable to almost everyone. This reliance on substantial duality gives the audience an anomalous feeling, caught between attraction and repulsion.

In this new exhibition, "Lost Bodies" is a monumental object installation consisting of a series of black-and-white photographic canvas bags featuring body parts such as noses, ears, breasts, genitals, buttocks, faces, hands, and toes. These are covered by a layer of mysterious black gauze, with air conditioning tubes connecting the bags. Periodically, these images expand and contract with breath, vividly demonstrating the mystery of life's existence and creating an extraordinary imaginative space.

The artist explains this work "Lost Bodies": "I wanted to realize this piece, which came from various retrospective exhibitions, giving me the opportunity to carefully revisit photographs I abandoned in 1998. I used negatives of adults, adolescents, children, and infants that I had never used before. Adolescents have grown up, many people I have lost contact with, former students, missing persons, etc. All these body and face fragments combine to construct my memory, becoming my portrait today. These images press close, brush past, and tumble together, swelling and sinking collectively or simultaneously, then revealing the will of the body disappearing in dance... I want to give them breathing life again, covering them in a faint black gauze."

In the basement, "Tidy Your Room" is a monumental object-installation formed by various unusual material elements. On two large walls, circular sketch badges are hung in strict order connected by black lines. On the ground appear a series of bizarre black objects of various sizes, resembling animal or human bodies, trees, small beds, toy cars, bundles, and block buildings, like a magical scene from a fairy tale. The artist says: "For two years, day or night, in the studio, room, or anywhere, pencils and paper were everywhere. I wrote and drew naturally, photos were everywhere. Then, using a badge maker, I lay on the floor, continuing to make badges. Over a thousand happy, messy ones scattered in every corner.... I have always liked badges; they flow on people's clothes, handbags, and bodies: used to affirm oneself, distinguish from others, social or political petitions, etc. Now I mostly hang these badges on black strings, arranged strictly on walls or cloth bundles, even on many other objects, all packed in cardboard boxes during this period. At the same time, I added black Skai elements to these badges: timeless objects that seem useless or discarded on the ground, such as toy cars, beds, doll furniture, broken puppets, etc., as if in a messy, untidy room...."

Annette Messager continuously explores the tension of emotions and internalized anomalous images, provoking extraordinary feelings in the audience between intimacy and violence, fear and security. She releases works conveying an extraordinary global message. The artist says, "I believe that the more unique the work, the easier it is to share excellently with others."