Annette Messager

She has been a major presence on the French art scene since the 1970s, and is close to Christian Boltanski, Sarkis and Jean Le Gac. Her oeuvre is inspired by the everyday and is made up of fragments (photographs, small random objects, newspaper clippings, dolls, etc.) which she assembles in installations that are sometimes of extensive scope. One intrinsic theme is a reflection on the place of women in society, as she expresses her own experiences as a woman in the domestic sphere shaped by the masculine gaze. Her practice, which melds the autobiographical and the fictional, approaches the idea of an “individual mythology”, as developed by curator Harald Szeemann, the artistic director of documenta 5 (1972). In 2005, Messager was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, where she represented France with her work Casino, a work that literally transformed the French pavilion into a casino.

Since the early 1990s, the Fondation Cartier has been collaborating with Messager, and has presented her work at Jouy-en-Josas in an exhibition entitled A Visage Découvert (1992). Four years later, the artist was featured in the exhibition Comme un Oiseau (1996), which resulted in the acquisition of her work, Mes Ouvrages (1988). The latter consists of a mural installation in which the artist associates fragments of the female body with excerpts of texts written upon the very wall.