A key figure on the international art scene, winner of the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in 2016, Annette Messager will be taking over the LaM from 11 May to 21 August 2022, for one the most important exhibitions held by a French public institution since her retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in 2007. For this new rendezvous, organised as part of the latest edition of lille3000, Utopia, the artist has chosen to present previously unseen works – drawings and installations – in which she proposes her own utopia, in which reality is tricked and taunted thanks to the magic of fiction.

Dates:
11.05 > 21.08.2022

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday
from 10 am to 6 pm

Prices* :
Full price: 10 €
Reduced price**: 7 €

*Excluding application fees
**Upon presentation of proof less than 3 months old and/or valid 
Face-to-face

Annette Messager was born in Berck-sur-Mer in 1943. Since the late 1960s, she has been developing a personal world in which she takes on a whole range of identities - Collector, Trickster and Practical Woman among them – which enable her, not without humour, to unravel the clichés traditionally associated with her dual status as a woman and an artist. Creator of chimeras, lover of word games and hawker of dreams, she delights in unnerving the public by immersing it in a world marked by carnival and fairy tales, where familiar features (everyday objects, soft toys, items of clothing, photographs of the human body, etc.) reveal their potential strangeness.

Specially conceived by the artist, the Comme si (As If) exhibition will give pride of place to drawing, a technique dear to her heart, which enables her to create a language not unlike haikus, those concise, highly pictorial Japanese poems. Previously unseen creations include a selection of seventy-six new acrylic ink drawings from the Tête-à-tête (Face-to-face) series, which presents tragicomic variations on the human skull, like so many vanitases.

Being an artist means continually healing one's own wounds, and at the same time exposing them endlessly.

Annette Messager portrait.

Annette Messager

Annette Messager, œuvre plastique représentant un utérus faisant un doigt d'honneur.
Annette Messager, L'Utérus doigt d'honneur, 2021. Objets divers, tissus et peinture acrylique ; 72 x 77 x 10 cm. Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery. © Adagp, Paris, 2022
"Annette Messager. Comme si", aquarelle représentant des squelettes.
Dessin de la série Tête à Tête, 2019-2020. Acrylique sur papier ; 42 × 32 cm. Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery. © Adagp, Paris, 2022
"Faire des cartes de France" d'Annette Messager, faites avec des morceaux de peluches.
Annette Messager, Faire des cartes de France, 2000. Morceaux de peluches, cordes, fils et pointes ; 420 x 385 cm. Acquisition en 2006 avec la participation du FRAM. LaM, Villeneuve d'Ascq. © Adagp, Paris, 2022
"Ghost" d'Annette Messager, œuvre plastique.
Annette Messager, Ghost, 2017. Filet, fil de fer, tissu peluche, matériaux divers ; 153 x 180 x 12 cm. Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery. © Adagp, Paris, 2022
Annette Messager, œuvre en cheveux représentant une lune.
Annette Messager, Lune-cheveux, 2016. Cheveux synthétiques, fil de fer ; 100 × 90 × 20 cm. Courtesy de l'artiste et Marian Goodman Gallery. © Adagp, Paris, 2022
Drawings and installations

Drawing is omnipresent and will also be found in her recent installations, deployed on floors and walls alike and dialoguing with other, older works such as Faire des cartes de France (Making Maps of France), created in 2000, purchased by the LaM in 2006, and recently complemented by the acquisition of twenty-one drawings.

Among her recent works, Annette Messager will also be presenting Dessus-Dessous (Above-Below) for the first time – swathes of red fabric undulating above luminous sculptures, an installation that revisits the work she created for the French Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale (and for which she won the Golden Lion) – and La revanche des animaux (Revenge of the animals), a composite installation in which heads of soft toys are grafted onto objects and architectures covered in mat black paper.

This new exhibition invites its visitors to reappropriate their personal histories through fiction and creation, and realise that, despite appearances, we do everything as if…
 

Curatorship

Marie-Amélie Senot, Associate Curator for Modern Art and Contemporary Art, LaM
 

Discover the teaser of the exhibition