Annette Messager Quotes

#1. There are confirmed stories of people who can break instruments and cause them to fail by walking in a room. I'm the opposite - I can walk into a room and something will work better than it is supposed to.

Robert Moog

#2. There is no worse torture than knowing intellectually
about love and the way.
Those Egyptian women, when they saw Joseph,
they were not judging his handsomeness.
They were lost in it,
cutting their hands as they cut their food.

Rumi

#3. 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

#4. [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

#5. Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity. But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.

Stephen Spender

#6. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

George Steiner

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

Annette Messager

#8. 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

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

Annette Messager

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

Annette Messager

#11. 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

#12. The Universe is a big ship and its captain is the Laws of Physics! The bad news is that there seems to be no safe harbour to dock and no lifeboats if we sink!

Mehmet Murat Ildan