Annette Messager Quotes

• Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

  Annette Messager

  Mean, Healing, Artist

  23 Copy quote

• Mostly, I believe an artist doesn't create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to point out what already exists, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it.... I didn't invent anything, I indicated.

  Annette Messager

  Believe, Artist, Sometimes

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• I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person.

  Annette Messager

  Arms, Faces, Photograph

  Interview with Frances Colpitt, www.artpace.org.

  14 Copy quote

• I have always believed that somehow the less we reveal the more the other desires to see.

  Annette Messager

  Desire, Always Believe

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• At first, I felt proud when someone said 'Your work looks like a man did it.' Then I realized that was stupid

  Annette Messager

  Stupid, Men, Proud

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• [My work] includes something about death, and about love, because the photos always have something to do with death. The photograph is like taxidermy. It is like the animals I use. They are posed in order to appear to be alive, but they are dead. Their time has passed. The photos have to do with time and loss, and conclusion.

  Annette Messager

  Loss, Animal, Love Is

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• I can see today that the same sort of issues lie behind taxidermy and photography. Taxidermy consists in preserving a bird in full flight... In the same way, photography halts and freezes motion and life.

  Annette Messager

  Photography, Lying, Issues

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• [Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.

  Annette Messager

  Photography, Real, Writing

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• Pornography is about images that are repeated, saturated. Images of the human body, not nature. What I find in pornography is precisely the repetition of the same: the clichés of pornography. There can be no real transgression, just an image that repeats itself.

  Annette Messager

  Real, Body, Repetition

  6 Copy quote

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