Annette Messager

French-born artist Annette Messager is best known for her multimedia installations, although she is also recognized for her work across mediums, in performance, painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. Utilizing themes as disparate as feminism and the body, dreamscapes, the aesthetic of collage, and theatrical environments, Messager’s work may appear upon first glance playful and whimsical, but it ultimately encourage viewers to take a serious look at the complexity of ideas on display. For instance, Messager incorporates found objects and the fruits domestic activities—toys, stuffed animals, needlework, and knitting—in her experiential installations, and with these, Messager examines quotidian life through a feminist lens. Indeed, Messager displays an overriding interest in corporeal and macabre themes, as body parts constitute a recurrent motif throughout the artist’s oeuvre.

Messager was awarded the Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. In 1995, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Museum of Modern Art co-organized the artist’s first major American retrospective. Messager has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Additionally, her work was included in the Biennale de Paris, dOCUMENTA, the Biennale of Sydney, the Venice Biennale, and the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon.