Annette Messager – Eux et nous, nous et eux, 2024

Since the late 1960s, Annette Messager has used techniques such as taxidermy, cuddly toys, embroidered fabrics and cut-out photographs, to develop a universe capable of containing the many different identities she has given herself over the years — the collector, the storyteller, la Bricoleuse, the Cheater, etc. — and also capable of questioning the clichés traditionally associated with her dual status as woman and artist. Drawing on mythology, popular imagery and art brut, her drawings, sculptures and installations combine, humorously or with great seriousness, personal and universal narratives, and real or fictional representations of the self.

Annette Messager’s strange and familiar bestiary is displayed in what used to be the archives room of the Hôpital de la Charité, built in 1741. The room was saved when the building was demolished, then reinstalled in the Cité Internationale de la Gastronomie during the renovation of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu in 2019. The artist’s masked chimeras, made from the bodies of stuffed animals and the mutilated heads of soft toys, hide among the carved woodwork of the room. Drawing on the medieval tradition of the danse macabre and popular theatre, Annette Messager’s work is a tragi-comic exploration of imaginary spaces of fear and sorcery. As a metaphor for the animal in every human being, it leads us to reflect on hybridisation and masquerade.