Annette Messager | Frieze New York 2021 at The Shed | 5–9 May 2021

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale.

Marian Goodman Gallery #newyork is delighted to feature a solo presentation by #annettemessager for Frieze #newyork at The Shed from May 5-9. On view will be two new installations and a recent series of drawings.

Annette Messager has been a pioneering force in #contemporaryart in Europe and beyond from the 1970s to the present. Her work is recognized for its heterogeneity of form and subject matter, drawing on the personal and the fictional, the social and universal. Utilizing principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical display, her diverse media have included construction, documents, language, objects, taxidermy, drawings, photographs, fabric, embroidery, image collections, albums, painting and sculpture. Her expansive installations transform space and provide immersive experiences to the viewer. Deeply interested in questions of genre, Messager has explored fairy tales, mythology, and doppelgängers throughout her œuvre. Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager's wide range of hybrid forms has an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, and the phantasmagoric.

Messager will present Petite Babylone, 2019, a floor installation made up of hundreds of abstract shapes and bodily forms in black wrap intermingled with stuffed animals, with shadows and light shifting along the wall. Messager’s calcinated Babylon is an apocalyptic realm, a landscape in the aftermath of a seemingly devastating #Event. In this ‘fin du monde’ scenario, living forms are destroyed, petrified, carbonized, and attacked by invading animals – a duck, a squirrel, a rabbit, a pigeon, a kitten, a raccoon, a lizard, a chicken, a bird. Hands, fingers emerge from certain structures, forming shadows that spin and shift on the wall.

At the edge of civilization, devoid of human presence, fossilized structures and spectral shadows reign. Messager conjures a zone suggesting both real Events, such as the tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, 2011, and reminiscent of the topography of darkness explored in recent works. Whether a phantasm, a subterranean world, or a universal state of mind, these menacing and satiric forms have been present in installations such as Continents Noir, 2010, or La Chambre des légendes, 2019, recently shown at the Institut Giacometti, Paris.

En même temps, 2021, an installation of drawings and petites effigies, is inspired in part by art history – drawing on, as Messager says, Constructivism and Constantin Brâncusi to Oskar Schlemmer and Alberto Giacometti. The opacity and uniformity of these small figures indicate parity between the forty-some tiny sculptures which are ‘hieratic and upright and represent us humans, and seem to be observing us.’ In dialogue with these small figures, Messager integrates a number of organic, elongated drawings which bring the inside outside, making the unseen seen. The drawings ‘play on our bodies, our organs, our fantasies; they seep in and circulate, seeming to disrupt the dignity of these little effigies, at the same time.’

The petites effigies, the tiny figures that Messager pins and suspends, and personifies and memorializes in her wall installations, represent hybrid forms that recall childhood toys or fetish objects. Often arranged in the style of entomological collections, placed at systematic intervals along a wall, they have been exhibited in diverse historical contexts over the years.

A selection of drawings from 2016–2020 imagines the female body as an otherworldly landscape, populated by saturnine orbs, moonscapes, and floating islands of female forms. Messager sees her drawings as close to poetry, both joyous and tragic. They are musings, doublings, a play on words, the imaginings of an itinerant wanderer — a vagabond en route from the celestial to the clandestine. A black heart corset mingles with dancing stars and comets. Hybrid couplings drift in space. A black breast silhouette bursts with floral life. Ghoulish memento mori lurk behind laptops and doorways. A triptych becomes a danse macabre of insects, primates, and skulls.