Endormis (2022)

Annette Messager, born in 1943 in Berck-sur-Mer, is one of the most internationally renowned contemporary French artists. Her polymorphic work, as she is a painter as well as a photographer, a painter and a sculptor, since she is as much a visual artist as she is a photographer, painter or sculptor, combines a wide variety of techniques (cut-outs, collage, drawing, writing, embroidery) and materials (stuffed animals, taxidermised animals, fabrics, photographs, and more). Her influences are numerous, ranging from popular imagery to religious or scholarly art brut, creating a subtle duality. Constantly blending realism and fantasy, she focuses on exploring questions of identity and examining the female condition.

"A game" or "a kind of wandering": this is how Annette Messager describes her graphic practice, which has become increasingly significant over the past decade. The drawings she produces—"visual haikus", in her own words—can stand alone or form part of larger installations, characteristic of her work since the 1970s. Through a deliberately simple vocabulary—sketched words, rebuses, silhouettes—and a palette characterised by its transparency, as she works with acrylics in the manner of watercolours, Annette Messager thus explores universal themes such as love, fear, fragility and desire.

Endormis (Asleep), in which two animals, in complementary colours, seem to float in an ambiguous atmosphere, somewhere between serenity and tension, belongs to this body of drawings by Annette Messager that takes the animal world as its subject—a bestiary, with tragicomic undertones, that runs through her entire body of work, which is largely populated by animal figures.

The limited edition of the same name is produced from the original drawing, on the occasion of the exhibition Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps, at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris), until September 20th, 2026.