Shannon McGill Senior Portfolio: Artist-Annette Messager

I am so excited about Annette Messager's work. Her themes, which speak about women's roles, feminine relationships, and yearning, are very interesting to me as an artist and in relationship to my own work. She seems to say the things that I sometimes want to say but am unsure of how to express. Her art is provocative and brave. I am also very interested in the way Messager presents photographs. I am experimenting with fragmenting my own images so seeing her sculptural instillations are inspiring. I enjoy he way the artist organizes photos in groups of frames and sometimes with other objects that give the work context.

Bio:

Annette Messager studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. She won first prize in the Kodak Photography International competition in 1964. In 1995 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York's Museum of Modern Art co-organized her first major American retrospective. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires (1999) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2004). She also exhibited in the Biennale de Paris (1977), Documenta VI (1977) and XI (2002), the Biennale of Sydney (1979, 1984, and 1990), the Venice Biennale (1980, 2003, and 2005), and the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2000. She won the Golden Lion Award at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

(Marian Goodman Gallery)

Quotes:

"At first, I felt proud when someone said 'Your work looks like a man did it.' Then I realized that was stupid"

"The path Messager chose instead was to embrace her gender, to become an artist who interpreted life - sex, love, beauty, pain, yearning, power - through the eyes of a woman. In this narrative, the petite, bright-eyed artist could be the fictional storyteller, and she would play all the roles"

-NY Times

"Her work often involves fragments, such as My Vows, which includes an large number of small close-up pictures of parts of the body. This tendency to fragment and catalog is everywhere in her work."

-http://www.oneroom.org/sculptors/messager.html