Annette Messager - Editions & Works on Paper New York Wednesday, February 12, 2025 | Phillips
  • In 1988, a small manmade island off the Dutch coast was animated with an immersive and monumental outdoor contemporary art exhibition – fifty massive 2x3 meter screenprinted flags waving in the breeze. The project was envisioned by the Gran Pavese Foundation, led by Thérèse Legierse, Peter van Beveren, and Ralph van Hesse. The foundation took their name from the Italian nautical phrase gran pavese which refers to the “dressing overall” of a voyaging ship, wherein the vessel is elaborately strung with maritime signal flags for ceremonial or celebratory purposes. Fifty internationally recognized artists were invited to design their own interpretation of a flag, with no thematic concept to unite them all beyond the medium, size and freedom to apply their own imagery and methodology to the project.  

     

    The U.S. Navy patrol boat USS Isabel (PY-10) at Hankow, China, dressed overall in honor of the coronation of King George VI of England, May 14, 1937.  

    While many artists chosen for the Gran Pavese project were already engaging with the varied iconography and ideology of flags in their practice, the notion of creating a flag itself offered a distinctive set of challenges and possibilities. Like a painting on canvas without a stretcher, the works would eventually embody a certain fluidity, not hanging stagnant on a gallery wall, but billowing freely in the air for all to see. Artists also needed to consider the histories and multifarious meanings endowed in the symbolism of flags such as existence, origin, distinction, authority, territory, loyalty, glory, belief, and identity, amongst other philosophical conceits. With their demonstrated grasps of the extensive significance of the flag form, each of the fifty artists rose to the occasion of the project to create flags that represented a global amalgamation of unique artistic visions, socio-political convictions, and conceptual frameworks – a staggering gran pavese for the contemporary era.  

     

    A video overview of the Gran Pavese project, including footage of the printing of the flags
    and their display on Neeltje Jans. © Gran Pavese.

     

    Due to both the individual creative success of each artist and the astounding experience of viewing the outdoor exhibition in its totality, the project attracted crowds of visitors to the island of Neeltje Jans. Following the Netherlands installation, the project, in all its beauty and scale, travelled the world, gracing the river borders of Frankfurt, the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Great Wall of China, and beyond. The international tour of 50 monumental flags paid homage to the Gran Pavese Foundation’s seafaring namesake, their various visuals and symbolisms representing a grand celebration of the international art community.  

    “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

    The French artist Annette Messager is known for her heterogeneity of materials and themes, producing a wide range of media from theatrical display to taxidermy in order to explore subjects from the personal to the fictional, the social to the universal, and the interactions between them. Her flag, similarly, is covered in varied visual symbols that expressively bleed together in color and form. Its imagery comprises of two open palms decorated with illustrations: flowers, a shoe, animals, a theatrical mask and spirals make appearances, along with a more intricately rendered landscape of rowboats on the water at sunset. Though these symbols are not explicitly defined, they are commonplace and recognizable, like the materials Messager deploys in her body of assemblage works. Through these illustrations, it is as if her flag’s subject holds a people – or even a world – in their hands, like tattoos that bear a collective memory or meaning.  

    • Condition Report

    • Description

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    • Literature

      Gran Pavese Foundation, Gran Pavese: The Flag Project, 50 Flags/50 Artists, 1988, pp. 86-87

Property from the Private Collection of Ralph van Hessen, The Hague, Netherlands

20

Untitled, from Gran Pavese – The Flag Project

1988
Monumental screenprint in colors, on polyester flag.
72 x 110 in. (182.9 x 279.4 cm)
Signed, dated and numbered 5/10 in black ink on the accompanying Certificate of Authenticity issued by the publisher (there were also 4 in Roman numerals), published by Gran Pavese Foundation, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

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$3,000 - 5,000 

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Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 12 February 2025