Annette Messager

[11/10/2016]

Recently awarded a major cultural distinction on the international art scene, the French artist Annette Messager will soon be inaugurating Marian Goodman’s new Parisian showroom. Besides, the gallery will be presenting her work at FIAC as soon as next week.

Her life and work…

Born on 30 November 1943 at Berck-sur-Mer on the northern French coast, Annette MESSAGER studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs before beginning an artistic career producing “cruel and fantastic” visual narratives. Her initial works were deliberately modified and counterfeited press photos and images. Then in the early 70s she began work on her first Residents, stuffed sparrows carefully clothed in colorful knitwear. These works set the tone for the artist’s later creations, exploring poetically (and sometimes cruelly) a number of themes including her daily experience as a woman and an artist, the magic and nightmares of childhood, détournement (as in object appropriation), arts & crafts and DIY. Her Pensionnaires, a seminal work, was exhibited at the Germain gallery in 1972 and marked the beginning of her emergence on the French art scene. During the following years, Annette Messager presented herself in numerous guises in a sort of multiple fictional biography, adopting the persona of a collector, a trickster, a peddler, a tinkerer, a practical woman or a woman in love. She uninhibitedly adopted different artistic styles, populating her world with Chimera made of fragments of photographs, drawings and manufactured objects. A good example of the “individual mythology” worked on by her artist husband, Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager’s work ingeniously oscillates between reality, fiction, gentleness, cruelty, attraction and repulsion. As of the 1990s, her installations were set up in larger spaces that she filled with strange shapes. Major museums invited her to show, including the New York MoMA in 1995. Ten years later she won a Golden Lion at the 51st Venice Biennale for her Casino installation, which occupied the three halls of the French Pavilion. From 2007 to 2009, her work gained widespread international exposure with a traveling retrospective that started at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and subsequently moved to the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (Japan), as well as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (Korea) and England.

Last month her artistic career was honoured by the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, a prize awarded by Japan’s imperial family on behalf of the Japanese Association of Fine Arts. An art world equivalent to a Nobel Prize, Praemium Imperiales are awarded every year to several major artists. In the “Sculpture” category, other French artists to have received this award are César, Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Christian Boltanski and Daniel Buren.

On the market?

Annette Messager has a very light secondary market profile. Only a hundred of her works have sold at public sales in 30 years. And yet… the artist was rapidly integrated into Contemporary art sales in London and New York. In the early 90s a set of Petites Effigies fetched between $10,000 and $15,000 in the States. Rare nowadays, these effigies can fetch $50,000 as we saw on 15 May 2015 at Phillips in New York. In the 2000s, Messager’s moved into a 6-figure price range (rare for a Contemporary French artist) and today both New York and Paris auctioneer’s are eager to include her work in their catalogues. Her key pieces from the Effigies, Pics and Voeux series have risen considerably in value in recent years: an installation from her Mes Voeux series was obtainable for under $40,000 in 2005 (11 May 2005 at Sotheby’s New York). Five years later, the same work fetched over $310,000 (8 December 2010 at Christie’s in Paris). This year, only one of her works has been offered on the secondary market: a drawing from the series Truqueuse at Cornette de Saint-Cyr in Brussels on 24 April 2016. An intimate but trenchant work in which the artist sets one of her hairs to the shape of a knife (Cheveux déposés par Annette M.), the piece had already remained unsold in Paris in 2014 and was again bought in despite a low estimate of around $2,000. But that was before Annette Messager received the Japanese imperial prize and before the prestigious Marian Goodman gallery announced her upcoming exhibition in Paris…