Annette Messager ingles

“I do not want to impose anything on the spectators -my history, my private life, my thoughts, my stories- but I do wish that it might be imposing. One wants to be current, contemporary, but also that it may pushed beyond the moment...�

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents the first major exhibition in Latin American of one of the leading figures in the world of contemporary art: Annette Messager (Berck-sur-Mer, France, 1943).

The exhibition consists of a selection of the most representative works from her career including installations that have become milestones in the history of art.

Her amazing repertoire of forms and materials remarkably toys with sensations and emotions. The artist has imprinted her works with the strength of a very personal language that dominates what is most intimate in human nature and demonstrates that there is no difference between art and personal life.

Annette Messager was honored with an homage at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, in 2007. Early in her career, she experimented with multiple alter egos such as Annette Messager “The Collector,” Annette Messager “The Practical Woman,” Annette Messager “The Forger,” among others. The world of “Annette the Collector” was presented at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1995), in a grand exhibition that included Les Pensionnaires (1971-1972), a work that denotes the devotion that the artist has for objects and that represents the human attitude towards tenderness and power.

The objects that she employs in her works, such as nets, photographs, cuddly toys, colored pencils, pieces of rags and stuffed animals are memories from Annette Messager’s childhood in Berck-sur-Mer on the French coast overlooking the English Channel. It was a time in which she was attracted to the patients in the nearby hospitals and their particular optimism and joy in spite of their poor health. The human body

and sickness captivated her and may have been the origins of her unprejudiced introspection towards the emotional nature of the human being.

The human body parts have been included in her works throughout her artistic career as can be found in Mes trophées (1986-1988), a series of photographic interventions in which Annette Messager drew on images presenting the body as a landscape, capturing emotions and referencing them to the fragmented consciousness of the body.

MARCO’s audiences will have the opportunity to understand works that have enormously impacted the art world. For example, Casino (2005), winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 2005. The installation, that seems to recreate the insides of a whale consists of a wave of red cloth wafting over the floor and masks hanging from the ceiling within a dimly lit room. These elements reflect the link between the condition of being alive and the fear of uncertainty.

In turn, the installation Articulés—Désarticulés (2001-2002) and the unusual setting created by her was given critical acclaim at Documenta XI, one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the world. The figures of cloth or felt are a mixture of animals with rag people that propose a new awareness of the relationship between our body and the living beings with whom we share the world.

On occasions, the reading of Annette Messager work wanders off to a lineal interpretation that then demands complex forms of understanding. Messager herself affirms that there is no real message in her work. However, the reflection that her works generate allows one to glimpse the possibility of living naturally with our desires without being of any consequence to what might result as dark or censurable to society.

GALLERIES: 6 through 11 / Second floor.

ON VIEW: 30 April through 12 September 2010.

TECHNIQUES: Installation, drawing, wall interventions, photography, collage and settings.

NUMBER OF WORKS: 27.

CURATORSHIP AND MUSEOGRAPHY: Annette Messager in collaboration with Jorge Contreras.

BIOGRAPHY 1943

Annette Messager was born in Berck-sur-Mer (Pasde Calais, France).

1962 She moved to Paris.

1962-64 The artist studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

1964 She received first place in the Kodak International Photography Competition.

1970 During the 1970s, her work was focused on everyday life using toys and embroideries as a point of departure.

1973 She had her first solo exhibition at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.

1977 Exhibited her work in the Paris Biennial and at Docu menta VI. 1979 Showed at the Sydney Biennial, and again in 1984 and 1990.

1980 Participated in the Venice Biennale, and again in 2003 and 2005.

1980 In the 1980s and 1990s her work became more complex, exuberant, melancholic, brutal and poetic.

1990 Towards the 1990s, she began to use cuddly dolls as personages.

1995 The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized her first major retrospective in the United States.

2000 Participated in the Contemporary Art Biennial in Lyon.

2002 Presented Articulés—Désarticulés at Documenta XI. 2004 Exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

2005 Won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.

2007 Had a solo exhibition at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris.

Annette Messager currently lives and works in Malakoff, France, and is preparing two other solo exhibitions for Warsaw and in Moscow.

Portrait of Annette Messager at the installation Casino, 2005 Photo by Marie Clérin My Little Effigies, 1988 Black and white photographs under glass, stuffed animals, color pencils on wall Dimensions variables Collection Centre Pompidou, París, Musée national d’art moderne / Centre de création industrielle

APRIL | SEPTEMBER 2010 | MARCO The use of cameras, camera phones and video cameras is not permitted.

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MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE MONTERREY Zuazua y Jardón S/N, Centro Monterrey, N.L. México 64000