MALAGA.- More than fifty years after they met, fell in love, and set out on parallel artistic paths, Annette Messager and the late Christian Boltanski are finally brought into direct conversation in a sweeping new exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Open now, the show reexamines two of France’s most influential postwar artists through a lens rarely applied to their careers: the story of their shared lives.
Although Messager and Boltanski lived together for decades and were deeply entwined emotionally and intellectually, they made an early and deliberate decision to keep their professional identities separate. The fear—especially on Messager’s side—was that a woman artist would be overshadowed by a man in the male-dominated art world of the 1970s. Their choice shaped the course of their careers: Boltanski rose to early fame, joining the prestigious Ileana Sonnabend Gallery by 1972, while Messager faced the slower, more arduous path shared by many women artists of her generation.
Yet as the Pompidou’s new exhibition shows, the separation between them was always more logistical than artistic. Curated by Annalisa Rimmaudo, the exhibition gathers over 70 works spanning more than three decades, revealing the subtle yet powerful affinities in their practices. For the first time, visitors can trace the quiet dialogue that unfolded between them—sometimes visible, often subliminal, but always profound.
Photography forms the earliest point of contact between the two artists. Both were fascinated by the medium’s ability to capture the ordinary: gestures, objects, and daily rituals. In the early 1970s, they each experimented with artists’ books, cataloguing and inventorying the world in ways that blurred the boundary between the poetic and the mundane. Messager’s albums and Boltanski’s photographic reconstructions of everyday life expose parallel obsessions with memory, documentation, and fragility.
These interests carried into their sculptural and installation work. Both artists embraced the museum vitrine—a tool usually meant for preservation—as a stage for raw, handmade objects. Messager displayed painted cardboard shoes, glasses, and watches; Boltanski arranged lumps of clay, knives, and blades. In their hands, the vitrine became a site of storytelling, a container for lives both real and imagined.
Yet despite these affinities, the exhibition makes clear their key divergence. Boltanski’s work often explores the absence of the body—its trace, its disappearance, its memory. Messager, by contrast, foregrounds presence, especially the female body and its social condition. This difference reverberates throughout the exhibition, shaping their approaches to vulnerability, identity, and the human condition.
By placing their works side by side, La trame de l’existence / The Thread of Life makes visible a relationship that profoundly shaped European art yet was seldom acknowledged publicly. Their careers may have unfolded independently, but their ideas evolved in tandem—echoing, responding, and sometimes quietly competing.
The Centre Pompidou’s exhibition invites viewers into that private artistic world, revealing not only two extraordinary careers but also the intimate, decades-long conversation that helped shape them. It is a reunion long overdue, and one that casts new light on two of the most remarkable artists of the last half-century.
