Artist Annette Messager: Like in a Dream

Why It Matters

Messager’s fusion of instinctive materiality and feminist themes reshapes contemporary art discourse, influencing how creators address gender and identity through mixed media.

Key Takeaways

• Instinct drives Messager’s mixed-media installations using strings, fabrics, photography.
• Childhood influence: architect father’s calm painting informs her artistic discipline.
• Black‑and‑white body imagery explores gender, motherhood, and human vulnerability.
• She embraces contradictions—love, cut, nets—to challenge conventional narratives.
• Dream‑state problem solving fuels her creative breakthroughs and project development.

Summary

Annette Messager, French contemporary artist, explains in the video how her practice blends installation, photography, and textile work, rooted in instinct and personal history.

She describes growing up with an architect‑painter father whose calm demeanor while painting shaped her disciplined yet spontaneous approach. Her work repeatedly employs black‑and‑white photographs of body fragments, strings, nets, and fabrics to interrogate gender, motherhood, and the fragility of human connections.

Specific examples include using fishing‑net motifs inspired by her coastal childhood, juxtaposing images of lovers with cut strings to highlight contradiction, and recounting how dreams provide immediate solutions to creative blocks.

Messager’s methodology underscores a broader shift toward interdisciplinary, feminist art that challenges traditional narratives, offering a template for artists seeking to merge personal narrative with material experimentation.

Original Description

French artist Annette Messager reflects on a practice shaped by intuition, memory, and a lifelong engagement with materials ranging from textiles to photography. Moving through her studio, she describes a tactile, almost performative relationship to her objects—nets, fabrics, and found elements that she treats as companions as much as artistic media. “ I like to play… to speak with them. They are my friends,” she says.

Messager resists over-intellectualizing her work, favoring instinct over analysis. “If I think too much, I don’t work… it’s very instinctive,” she explains. This approach can be traced back to her childhood, where exposure to her father’s artistic practice revealed art as both an emotional outlet and a discipline. Yet her path was not without resistance. Coming of age in the early 1970s, she encountered entrenched gender biases: “They say, but the best creation for a woman is maternity… They don’t want to see the work of a female artist.”

Her oeuvre spans multiple identities and mediums, from installations to photography, often unified by recurring motifs such as nets, threads, and bodily fragments. These elements, she suggests, draw partly from her upbringing near the sea, where fishing nets were a constant presence. In her hands, however, they become symbols of connection and tension—cut, tied, and reconfigured into poetic assemblages.

Messager’s influences extend beyond the visual arts to literature and cinema. She cites the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock as a key inspiration, particularly his use of close-ups: “I tried to do this with the photo.” Her work, often feminist in orientation, is equally informed by everyday life—newspapers, passersby, and fleeting observations that she transforms into layered narratives.

Despite the conceptual richness of her practice, Messager describes a deeply personal and continuous engagement with her work. “I am obsessed by my work… when I leave in the night, I am thinking or I dream,” she says, underscoring the persistence of artistic inquiry beyond the studio. Ultimately, she frames her career in terms of both dedication and gratitude: “I think I have the chance to be an artist and to do what I wanted to do. My life was beautiful.”

Annette Messager (b. 1943, France) is a major figure in contemporary art, known for her multimedia installations that combine textiles, photography, and found objects. Emerging in the 1970s, she developed a distinctive, feminist-inflected practice that challenges traditional hierarchies of art and craft. She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2005, where she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, and her work has been exhibited widely in leading museums and institutions worldwide.

Annette Messager was interviewed by Christian Lund at her studio in Malakoff, Paris, in January 2026.

Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard

Edit: Nanna Dahm

Produced by Christian Lund

Music via Upright:

Somewhere In The Light by Ben Stone

Sightseeing In Old Paris by After In Paris

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

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