Annette Messager avec et sans raisons

This is Messager’s first exhibition in London since her 2009 Hayward Gallery exhibition, The Messengers. 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 wallpaper. As is common in Messager’s practice, she cultivates an environment of lexical literalness, reversal and ambiguity.

Messager’s chosen title for this exhibition encapsulates her fondness for word-play and double entendre. On one level, Avec et sans raisons may be understood as “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 this rationality. The collection as a whole reveals an indomitable freedom of spirit.