Annette Messager: Tragikomedie – Five Decades of Art at Kunsthalle Praha

Kunsthalle Praha presents a major solo exhibition by French artist Annette Messager, exploring her five-decade practice that interweaves tenderness with unease. The exhibition uses everyday materials to examine memory, identity, desire, and the representation of the body and gender.

Kunsthalle Praha is hosting a significant solo exhibition dedicated to the renowned French artist Annette Messager, tracing her artistic journey over more than fifty years. Messager is celebrated for building a unique world where tenderness and unease coexist, and the familiar is rendered strange. Her practice consistently transforms everyday materials such as fabric, toys, photographs, and stuffed animals into profound statements on memory, identity, and desire. Whether through expansive installations or intimate works on paper, Messager crafts narratives that critically question societal representations of the body, gender, and emotional experience. The exhibition delves into the core themes that have defined Messager’s practice across five decades. Early works scrutinize systems of control, classification, and the stereotypes associated with women, often employing humor and subtle subversion. In the 1980s, she pioneered new representations of the female figure, creating figures of freedom, desire, and visibility in the form of reimagined witches, monsters, and heroines. Her ongoing examination of power, exposure, and self-definition continues through her later drawings and sculptural pieces. The immersive installations skillfully combine objects, textiles, lights, and movement, creating environments that oscillate between playful and unsettling. More recent works return to the body, focusing on its traces and absences to evoke themes of protection, isolation, sexuality, and instability. Throughout her oeuvre, Messager masterfully embraces contradiction—care and violence, order and chaos, humor and sadness—inviting viewers to reconsider their perceptions of the body, desire, and the stories that shape our understanding of ourselves and others. This exhibition, initiated by Kunsthalle Praha, is realized in collaboration with the artist and Studio Messager, and is accompanied by a publication featuring essays and an interview with Annette Messager.

Visitors can purchase tickets via the provided link. Audioguides are available in multiple languages and were created in collaboration with the Cabinet of Wonders platform.