Annette Messager Quotes

#1. 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

#2. [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

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

Annette Messager

#4. 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

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

Annette Messager

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

Annette Messager

#7. 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