Messager and Boltansky open their family album in their first major joint exhibition at the Pompidou Málaga

At the start of an installation, visitors must walk around a pair of shoes placed on the ground in a circle. These worn shoes belong to the artists: Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944-2021) and Anette Messager (Berck, 1943). Her smaller shoes are placed inside his, sometimes facing the opposite direction. The installation speaks for itself. It represents a lifetime of walking together, culminating in a joint exhibition. Or perhaps, walking in each other's shoes. The work, aptly named 'Together AM-CB,' serves as a vivid metaphor for the parallel careers of this renowned French and international art couple, who met in the 1970s but chose to maintain the independence of their respective narratives. They had never starred in a joint exhibition that reviewed their simultaneous careers until now, debuting at the Centro Pompidou Málaga, where these two multidisciplinary artists have opened their personal family album to the public, as their individual productions share inspiration from experience and memory.

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"This is the first time I've agreed to this joint exhibition with both works. It's something I always wanted to keep separate since the 1970s because being a female artist was complicated, tough, and you were always considered the artist's girlfriend," explained Annette Messager in Málaga this Thursday, still fiercely opposing the mindset of the last century that relegated women's roles to "motherhood" alone. "I never agreed with it and wanted to do something on my own, so I thought it was appropriate to work separately," added the artist, who also agreed to this first major joint exhibition, titled 'AM CB. Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski', as a tribute to her husband who passed away in 2021. And while their respective exhibitions were always individual and separate, behind closed doors, their relationship was quite different.

"In the 1970s, being a female artist was complicated, tough, and you were always considered the artist's girlfriend"

Annette Messager

Artist

"We talked a lot about art, not about our collections, but about art because it was our life," concluded Messager, who prefers not to explain her work and instead invites viewers to experience it. "When a critic asks me about my work, I make it up because I am very intuitive and if I thought about it too much, it would lose its meaning and purpose," said the French creator, who in this sort of family album at the Pompidou shows how both of their productions fed and even challenged each other. Thus, Annette's early drawings confront Christian's photographs from the 1970s, a medium both transcended towards hybrid and multidisciplinary works in materials that seek installation and even explore the boundaries with sculpture.

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The thirty works on display also include oil, drawing, charcoal, steel, pastel, glass, fabrics, stuffed animals, documents, mesh, shoes... "Exploring the same media and devices, they photographed each other and were life partners, but they separated their paths to revolutionize art independently," noted the exhibition curator, Annalisa Rimmaudo, highlighting that their works had "never" been displayed in this way before, making the Málaga exhibition an "unprecedented dialogue" between the two artists who present their particular "fictional autobiographies" with pieces that appeal to emotions through "a new form that is sentimental conceptualism."

Affinities and Divergences

Indeed, Messager's rag dolls impaled on spears or Boltanski's showcases with photos and documents directly appeal to the observer from the artists' personal experiences, although what they show moves from fiction to art. The parallel-mounted works of one and the other - or vice versa - allow for an examination of each artist's affinities, little analyzed precisely due to the lack of confrontation. Thus, the exhibition from the Pompidou in Paris - currently closed for renovation - private collections, and the private funds of the artist herself reveal themes that particularly concerned them, such as fate and the human condition for CB and the role of women for AM, while highlighting the absence of the body in his work and the figurative presence in hers with her striking stuffed animals and even taxidermy.

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