“The quilts, sleeping bags, puffer jackets and duvets are recent materials – warm, soft, protective cocoons. They take all kinds of forms and are with us day and night, on our clothed or naked bodies. [...] They can suggest sleep, dreams or nightmares, love, sexuality, or isolation.”
- Annette Messager about Sleeping Songs, press release Galerie Marian Goodman, 2019

Sleeping Heart is a mural sculpture which is part of a series titled Sleeping Songs (2018–19). To create them, Annette Messager worked with coloured sleeping bags, quilts and hooded puffer jackets. With undulating folds, evocative volumes and forms were created. Human hands emerge from the folds, gaps and orifices orchestrated by the artist. How many scenarios become possible when two hands reach out to one another but fail to meet, when several hands overlap and lightly touch? Versatile and rich in meaning, Sleeping Heart can be understood to allude to our desire to connect. Its form, a heart, refers to love, friendship, togetherness. Yet, stitched together, the absent bodies are destined to stay in their own compartment. The two hands next to each other barely touch.

Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, London.
2017 - Duvet, mixed media, acrylic paint, string - 125 x 85 x 42 cm

Image credit: Annette Messager Sleeping Heart, 2017 Duvet, mixed media, acrylic paint, string 125 x 85 x 42 cm Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, London. Photo / Rebecca Fanuele

Annette Messager
°1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France

From the 1970s onward, Annette Messager’s work has been known for a heterogeneity of form and subject matter, ranging from the personal to the fictional, the social to the universal. Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager's wide range of hybrid forms has had an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, and the phantasmagoric. Annette Messager was awarded Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 2016. She won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Her work has been exhibited most recently at a.o. the Institut Giacometti in Paris (2018), the Institut Valencià Art Modern (IVAM) in Spain (2018), and the Villa Medici in Rome (2017), and is included in the collections of the world’s greatest museums such as MoMa and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; LACMA, Los Angeles; K21, Düsseldorf; The National Gallery, Canberra; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Annette Messager is represented by

Marian Goodman Gallery. She lives and works in Malakoff, just south of Paris.