8/10 2026—7/3 2027
Galleries 1 & 2
Curators: Christelle Havranek, Theo Carnegy-Tan
Kunsthalle Praha presents a major solo exhibition dedicated to the French artist Annette Messager. For more than fifty years, Messager has built a world where tenderness meets unease and where the familiar becomes strange. Working with everyday materials such as fabric, toys, photographs, and stuffed animals, her art transforms the ordinary into fragile monuments to memory, identity, and desire. Whether in expansive installations or intimate works on paper, she tells stories that question how we represent the body, gender, and emotional experience.
During the exhibition, visitors will have access to a multilingual audioguide created in collaboration between Kunsthalle Praha and the Cabinet of Wonders platform.
Messager represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion. Her work has since presented in major institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Hayward Gallery in London.
The exhibition follows the major themes that have shaped Messager’s practice across five decades. Her early works explore systems of control, classification, and the stereotypes attached to women—often with humour and subtle subversion.
During the 1980s, Messager began to develop new ways of representing the female figure. Her reimagined witches, monsters, heroines, and protest figures become agents of freedom, desire, and visibility. Through later drawings and sculptural figures, she continues to examine power, exposure, and the right to define oneself.
Her installations bring together objects, textiles, lights, and movement to create immersive environments that oscillate between playful and unsettling. Recent works return to the body through its traces and absences, evoking themes of protection, isolation, sexuality, and instability.
Across her entire oeuvre, Messager embraces contradiction: care and violence, order and chaos, humour and sadness. Her works invite us to look again at what we think we know. At the body, desire, and the stories that shape how we see ourselves and others.
The exhibition is initiated by Kunsthalle Praha and realized in collaboration with the artist, and Studio Messager. A publication accompanies the exhibition, including essays and an interview with Annette Messager.
