Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Annette Messager


Annette Messager's work was on display at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris last summer. I'd never seen her works in embroidery, paper, fabric and soft sculpture before. One installation, “Gonflés/Dégonflés”, was a large room filled with soft-sculptured human organs, constructed as bladders filling with air and emptying over and over as if they were breathing- or coming to life and dying again and again.

Far more subtle than her large-scale installations is "Ma Collection de Proverbes" (1974), a wall of sexist and misogynistic proverbs from different countries, embroidered deliberately without regard to precision or care on simple squares of fabric:

"What's worse than one woman? Two women."
"Women are like spices, the more you beat them the better they smell."
"There are no ugly women at night."
Link