ANNETTE MESSAGER / Mes Enluminures, two

Published in conjunction with the first retrospective in the United States of the work of French artist Annette Messager (b. 1943), one of the most provocative and important contemporary artists working in Europe. Alternating between a quiet conceptualism and a raucous expressionism, the work in the exhibition included books that inquire into the nature of women’s roles, photographs transformed by paint into fairytale monsters, ensembles comprising hundreds of photographs of body parts, and multimedia installations that explore the multiple meanings of objects and images placed in new contexts.

Multiple sources inform Messager’s work, including Symbolism and Surrealism, how-to books, magazine and newspaper articles, advertisements, astrology, religious art, art brut, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The influence of Surrealist photography, with its fragmentation of the human body and voyeuristic aspect, is evident in My Vows (1988–91), where numerous photographs of body parts hang from strings, overlapping and partially obscuring one another. In My Trophies (1986–88), Messager calls upon the less-regarded arts of tattooing, palmistry, children’s books, and medieval manuscripts to create the symbols and marks that she draws over photographs of body parts.