Annette Messager

Annette Messager (b. 1943, Berck, France) is a French artist who lives and works in Malakoff, near Paris. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris in the 1960s. Her practice, developed since the late 1960s, has consistently engaged the gendered distribution of labor, the domestic sphere, and the cultural treatment of the body and of objects — working with embroidery, photography, drawing, stuffed animals, and large-scale installation. She was the life partner of Christian Boltanski (1944–2021), with whom she met in 1970; the two artists chose early on to keep their careers strictly separate, exhibiting together only occasionally, though a sustained mutual influence runs beneath their parallel trajectories. Following Boltanski's death, the exhibition « AM CB » at the Centre Pompidou Málaga (2025–2026) brought their work into dialogue for the first time in a dedicated joint presentation.

Her early work — Les Pensionnaires (1971–72), in which sparrows were mounted and individually dressed in knitted garments; the Albums series, in which she compiled intimate photographs under different fictional titles; the Chimères series, pairing drawn figures with photographs — staged a systematic examination of how femininity is constructed, surveilled, and reproduced through cultural artifacts and the female body. Her large-scale installations, beginning in the 1980s, incorporated suspended fabric, netting, and light to create immersive environments in which fragments of bodies, texts, and images circulate without resolution. She received the Venice Biennale Golden Lion in 2005 for Casino, an installation filling the French Pavilion with suspended body parts, nets, and motorized elements — one of the most widely discussed works in the history of the Biennale.

A major retrospective, Le Messager, was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2007. Her work is held by MoMA, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and major collections internationally.