Annette Messager

Eschewing a conventional chronological framework, this exhibition of major works by French artist Annette Messager employs a complex organizational concept to present an extensive survey of the artist’s practice, ranging from her intimate art from the ’70s up through works from the present day. The exhibition begins with her dynamic installation La Ballade des pendus (The Ballad of the Hanged Ones), 2002, in which anthropomorphic figures hang from a track attached to the ceiling, fitfully moving around in a quietly creaking spectacle that simultaneously recalls a macabre procession and a fairground carousel. This work exemplifies one of the central features of the artist’s oeuvre: the synchronicity of comic, tragic, poetic, and ludic elements. Viewers may choose to enter the exhibition from either its entrance or its exit, though both paths culminate in the center at the well-known theatrical installation Casino, for which the artist earned a Golden Lion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Beneath a billowing sea of red silk, an uncanny landscape of fantastical subcutaneous creatures pulsate and fluoresce. Like organs, the artist’s works are distributed throughout the exhibition’s “body,” displaying the bustling and sensual elements that have for many years constituted the bulk of Messager’s production. The exhibition is uncompromising in its accommodation of the artist’s prolific and multifarious content. Pulling from her various cycles and series, the exhibition presents an expansive selection of her stuffed-animal installations, paintings, wall collages, photographs, and other works from the ’70s and ’80s that develop the theme of female identity within their contemporaneous feminist context.