Les Lignes de la main (The Lines on the Palm), 1988, is part of a famous series that emerged from the monumental installation of the same name, first presented at the Consortium in Dijon in 1988. The exhibited work consists of four framed elements combining black-and-white photographs enhanced with colorful pastel or watercolor drawings and columns of handwritten text.

The photographs of open palms become a realm of intimacy, revealing inner landscapes and enigmatic figures. The words—protection, return, fear, caution—denoting emotional states of vigilance, are tirelessly transcribed. “For me, these are offerings to the photograph of the hand placed atop the writings,” explains Messager. “The repeated word loses its meaning; it becomes a litany… an incantation…” Arranged directly on the floor, the four frames form a unique installation in the series that presents itself to the viewer like relics to be examined, reinforcing the dimension of a secular ex-voto or a simulacrum of palmistry.
 

In Just Married, 2011, shown for the last time in France in 2012, a white tulle bridal veil covers an upside-down broom leaning against the wall. In this single work, Messager brings together the sacred and the mundane, the promise and the everyday, the dream and the reality, to reveal what the wedding ritual conceals beneath the glamour of the ceremony.

The veil, like nets, masks, or drapery, is part of the artist’s longstanding obsession with materials that simultaneously conceal and reveal. The household implement appears as a specter, a presence that persists despite itself. Here, the veil does not conceal much: the broom refers as much to the reality of the female condition as it does to the idealization of married life. 

An early work, Les Qualificatifs donnés aux femmes (The Terms Attributed to Women), 1972, was created two years before Ma Collection de proverbes, 1974, in which nearly 150 sayings that reinforce misogynistic stereotypes in popular culture were embroidered onto small white cotton squares. Through these two works, the artist employs—with a certain degree of irony—a technique traditionally associated with women: embroidery. Here, on black fabric, terms commonly used by men to describe women are embroidered in colored thread.

Stripped of any context that might soften them, these 41 expressions strike the viewer with their brutality. Whether they are outright insults or feigned terms of endearment, they all express, behind a supposed tenderness, a derogatory judgment towards women. The needle, diverted from its ornamental use, becomes a critical instrument: embroidering these terms strips them of their practical value and imbues them with an archival quality.

In Mes Ouvrages (Tolérance) (My Handiworks (Tolerance)), 1988–1989, a close-up photograph of a mouth, surrounded by the word “tolérance” handwritten in blue pencil and repeated so many times that it forms a line tracing the shape of a star. Through sheer repetition, the meaning of the word fades away, leaving only a visual litany—a drawing coupled with a magical incantation.

An echo of the large-scale installation Mes Ouvrages—whose initial version consisted of some fifty elements and words written in pencil directly on the wall—this work concentrates within the confines of its frame the principle of detaching the word from its sentence, from the body of its whole. In Mes Ouvrages, the chosen words often come from the lexicon of emotional expression and the language of love. At times tender, at times anxious, even threatening, they capture the ambiguity that links happiness to madness and death.

Always playing with words, Messager created her first plush “word sculptures” at the turn of the 2000s, having already introduced black netting into her work, Vœux, a few years earlier. It was around 2005 that she began draping her words—whose letters were formed by twisted wires—in black netting. The black netting, reminiscent of Berck-sur-Mer, her hometown on the seaside, creates the effect here of ink that has smudged and dripped.

Here, Messager forms the Baudelairean word Spleen, that more or less enduring melancholy without any apparent cause. The work is itself afflicted by this emotional state, sagging on one side and appearing to collapse toward the floor. Created last year and exhibited in the artist’s studio, Spleen is being presented to the public for the first time as part of this exhibition.
 

Rarely exhibited, the installation Les Amoureux (The Lovers), 2016 is constructed as a visual palindrome that can be read both forward and backward, with neither direction being more “true” than the other. It features two silhouettes of embracing couples, arranged in a mirror image and covered in black acrylic paint—a medium frequently used by the artist. Resembling wedding cake figurines and symbols of marital bliss, they are suspended here from a butcher’s hook.

For Messager, those who love one another are bound together; the embrace protects as much as it imprisons. However, the hook—a single, precarious point of balance—introduces instability, revealing the fragility of romantic bonds.

According to Annette Messager, “Photography implies a voyeuristic—and, in a certain sense, sadistic—relationship with the model.” Here, in Les Voiles (The Veils), 1985, the photographic collage plays with two layers of veil, cultivating the ambiguity between transparency and concealment. A naked person curled up on a bed, over whom looms the menacing shadow of a creature with disproportionately large feet, evokes a scene steeped in mystery, fantasy, and danger.