Annette Messager: Tragicomedy

Kunsthalle Praha presents a comprehensive solo exhibition by French artist Annette Messager. For more than fifty years, Messager has been creating a world where tenderness meets restlessness and familiar things take on a new, strangely unsettling character. From ordinary materials such as fabrics, toys, photographs, and stuffed animals, she creates fragile monuments of memory, identity, and desire. In large-scale installations, intimate drawings, or collages, she tells stories that question the ways in which we commonly depict the body, gender, and emotional experience.

Messager represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2005, where she won the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion. Her works have been presented in a number of leading institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, MoMA in New York, and the Hayward Gallery in London.

The exhibition traces the main thematic circles that have shaped Messager's work across five decades. Her early works explore systems of control, classification, and stereotypes associated with women. Often with humor and subtle subversion.

In the 1980s, Messager began to develop new ways of depicting the female figure. Her witches, monsters, heroines, and protesting figures become bearers of freedom, desire, and visibility. Later drawings and sculptural works further develop this reflection on power, disclosure, and the right to self-determination.

Her installations connect objects, textiles, light, and movement into immersive environments that oscillate between playfulness and unease. In her latest works, Messager returns to the body through its traces and absence, opening up themes of protection, isolation, sexuality, and human fragility.

Throughout her work, Messager works with the tension between opposites: care and violence, order and chaos, humor and sadness. Her works invite us to re-examine what we take for granted: the body, our desire, and the stories that shape our view of the world.

The exhibition was initiated by Kunsthalle Praha and created in collaboration with the artist and Studio Messager. A publication containing essays and an interview with Annette Messager accompanies the exhibition.

A multilingual audioguide created in cooperation with Kunsthalle Praha and the Cabinet of Wonders platform will be available to visitors during the exhibition.

Exhibition Program