Annette Messager | La Messaggera di Villa Medici

“La Messaggera di Villa Medici” is at once exuberant, poetic, trivial, and exhilarating.
Born in 1943, Annette Messager is one of French art’s most respected international figures. In 2005 she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Her hybrid oeuvre—a mix of painting, embroidery, sculpture, collage, and writing—has been the subject of major exhibitions, notably at MoMA in New York in 1995 and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007. She was, too, the recipient of the Praemium Impériale prize for sculpture in 2016.
Sculpting an eccentric, dreamlike path through and around the Villa Medici, Messager shows that for her places are linked to the body and to skin.
“All my work,” she has said, “speaks only of the body.”
Her creations are built around women’s everyday existences, exploring their rebellions, their fears, and their fantasies with the help of scraps of fabric, color pencils, doctored images, and a jumble of nightmarish chimeras involving steel spikes, dolls, and hooded soft toys.