On view in the North Gallery will be an installation titled Inflating, Deflating (“Gonfles/dégonflés”), 2005-2006, as well as a new series, To Bring into the worlds (“Mettre aux mondes”), 2006 which will consist of a dozen different works. The latter responds to the piece Inflating Deflating, and will include eight new drawings.

About To Bring Into the Worlds, Annette Messager writes:

These are balls of solid earth painted to look like world globes, sometimes these worlds are trapped in nets, or appear to be invaded or attacked by little shapes, also made from earth, from which color pencils point, like toy ships, battleships and airplanes.

At times the worlds become two characters placed on a bolster. Other worlds are buried and turn into the eyes of a long nosed skull (dead Pinocchio?), develop into an animal, or get trapped in a sock (to be mended?) The series of eight new drawings starts with this theme of women ‘bringing into the worlds’.

Our worlds are made of real or fantasy worlds, the world of ideas, socio-economic world, spiritual world, art world, everyday world; for instance my neighbor could be the person I see most often and at the same time be the most remote from my world. But in all these worlds there is only one human species, universal and unique.

Inflating- Deflating” consists of around thirty elements, mingled internal and external human body parts: arms, lungs, foot, stomach, organs, etc. all made of painted parachute fabric. Here our body is isolated in fragments, which mix and go through each other: the brain meets a breast, which is friends with a stomach, which in turns brushes against entrails. There is an interweaving of the inside and the outside, jungle of skin, organs, fluids, and immersed body parts. These voluntarily schematized elements breathe, inflate simultaneously, or together are like a landscape of breaths, panting, breaths of wind, which slowly deflate, expire…. – Annette Messager, 2006

Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager’s wide range of hybrid forms has had an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, the phantasmagoric.

From early sequences of hand-made objects, to the Collections and then the Albums series; from installations based on the aesthetics of collage and accumulation to theatrical display environments; from giant bestiaries to dreamscapes of the feminine and the body; and from the domestic and fictional-autobiographical to the social, Messager’s work has successively introduced new elements ‘rummaged’ from everyday materials and has often progressed into ongoing ‘series’ or resulted in dramatic incursions into space.

In the last decade, along with the pliant forms, dissected innards, flattened animal bodies, and soft toys that have been part of her artistic vocabulary has come a collapsing or ‘deflating’ of form. In recent installations the artist has taken new approaches to this ‘deflation’, giving ‘breath’, and life to her work. In the current exhibition, there is movement to the fragmented and organic bodies at play, and perhaps a wry meditation upon birth and creation.