Annette Messager Exhibition
Marian Goodman Gallery
This event has ended.
Marian Goodman Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Annette Messager.
The exhibition will include a series of works created between 2007 and 2012, including two large scale installations Continents Noirs (Black Continents), 2010-12 and Et range ta chambre (And clean up your room), 2007-2009, well as a series of “Chance” drawings which will be shown in the North Gallery Viewing Room. In this exhibition, Messager’s role as inventive collector and bricoleur of daily life in the practice of making sculpture transforms and takes on new forms as her works move from the dark whimsy of the domestic and familial to the illusory world of sci-fi invention and Swiftian imagination. In both, she presents a glimpse at an unseen, fossilized world.
In the North Gallery, Continents Noirs, 2010-2012, is poised in suspension in the space, hung from the ceiling and viewable from below. Both phantasm and fantasy, it appears as a spatial landscape floating and suspended in the air like a metaphysical city in which the elements appear black, carbonized, and subterranean. In presenting a dark, petrified topography of the intelligible and the unfathomable, Messager offers her reflection on, as Catherine Grenier writes ‘engulfed childhood’s world and its hope… Wrapping up objects or shaping up forms in black metallic paper, she composes and assembles an atlas of daily life creating a fossilized world”.
Catherine Grenier continues: “The compilation of these tens of fossils engender two large installations. “Black Continents” is inspired from an episode of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’: the moment when he is welcomed to a flying island, an insular microcosm which travels in the air. The artist creates several ‘islands’ suspended into space, where a conglomerate of objects and architectural forms are pressing on to the surface. The choice for these architectural forms either conical or abstract in their shape makes one think of the metaphysical world of de Chirico or the allegorical archaism of Carra. But the surface evenly black and prismatic aspect of the objects as the absence of any organic or human presence bring closer the gigantic crystallization of small islands and bring us down to the abyss of an underground mineral world.”
In the South Gallery, the installation Et range ta chambre (And clean up your room), 2007-2009, consists of numerous elements grouped around three main series of works: in one section, black cords are suspended on two walls on which are pinned badges featuring original drawings by the artist; in another area, various objects made in skaï, including miniature cars, furniture, beds, dolls, abandoned toys, and other elements of an untidy room, are set against the architectural element of the outline of a house and a large tree assuming the absence of attendant characters; and finally, a third element includes abstract forms which drape and hang in the space.
Of this work the artist writes: For the last two years, during the day, in the evening, in rooms everywhere on small pieces of paper I have been sketching, writing words, placing photos, drawing, which I have then used to make badges. For a long time I kept more than a thousand badges on the floor in a sort of joyful disorder… I have always liked pins, badges; they travel with us pinned to our clothes, our bags, or bodies: asserting our identity, differentiating us from others or indicating social or political ideas. Now most of my badges are fixed to black ropes and evenly pinned to the wall; either fixed to bundles of fabric to various objects, or waiting in cardboard boxes. At the same time, the other elements made in black skaï, have been added to these badges, objects without age, without use, suspended or left on the ground, little cars, beds, broken puppets, for an untidy room.” (Annette Messager, 2009).
Media
Schedule
from June 26, 2012 to August 24, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-06-26 from 18:00 to 20:00