Annette Messager to Present New Solo Exhibition Avec et Sans Raisons at Marian Goodman Gallery London

Marian Goodman is pleased to present Annette Messager’s first solo exhibition at the London gallery. Messager’s work has not been shown in London since her 2009 solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. With the exception of three pieces from the 1984–86 series Mes Reliques (My Relics), visitors will discover recent works, some never shown before. The exhibition, entitled Avec et sans raisons, brings together works that display a diversity of forms: small assemblages of objects, acrylic washes, textile works in the form of installations, and a wallpaper. As she often does, Annette Messager cultivates antithesis, complementarity, and, as ever, polysemy.

Even the title of the exhibition seems programmatic. As Annette Messager’s fondness for word-play and punning is well known, one can venture a double reading of the word raison. On one level, Avec et sans raisons may be understood to mean “having reason, or cause, for doing something, or not”; but one could go further and take it to mean “being deprived, or in possession of, the faculty of reason.” Messager offers an experience full of contrasts. While some works have a clear underlying rationality, the absurd character of others soon comes to undermine it. The collection as a whole reveals an irreducible freedom of spirit.

Alluding to Pascal who, in Les Pensées (1670), drew a distinction between the “geometric mind” which analyses reality through the lens of reason, and the “intuitive mind,” which, above all, “sees the matter at once, at a glance, and not by a process of reasoning,” Messager invites the visitors to put their “geometric mind” to the test and make use of their “intuitive mind” in order to better succumb to the lightness of what seems to have no raison d’être. There thus are three works that will take the viewer by surprise: Gants croix, Gants triangle, and Gants croix oblique (2017). The minimalism of these three pieces, made of simple lengths of taut string with end-points in the form of gloves studded with coloured pencils, stands out. Their mathematical rectitude, however, gives way to an unruly tangle of references, presenting us with utmost whimsy—as in En trottinette (On my Scooter) (2017), 3 Escargots-seins (3 Snails-breast) (2017), Le Bras chaussure (The Arm Shoe) (2015), or En équilibre (In Balance) (2015). These sculptures intensify unusual associations between objects, including breasts shaped like snail shells, an infant’s arm emerging from a child’s shoe, a carbonised Barbie doll precariously balanced with both legs in the air. The resulting bizarre forms, as much uncanny as burlesque, defy any rational reading.

Imogen McGill

19th April – 22nd May 2017 at Marian Goodman Gallery London, click here for further information.