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The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris presents “Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps”, the exhibition of Annette Messager, a multidisciplinary artist whose work intervenes with museum’s permanent collection. Uniting historic oeuvres with site-specific installations, the exhibition unfolds as an encyclopaedia of artist’s works produced over more than fifty years of her career.

Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps is the title of the exhibition by Annette Messager (Berk-sur-Mer, 1943), Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, curated by Colin Lemoine at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris until 20 September 2026.
Since its foundation in 1967, the museum investigates human-animal relationships through art, ranging from ancient works to contemporary practices, including temporary projects with artists Sophie Calle, Sterling Ruby, Lionel Sabatté, Eva Jospin. These projects evade the “Kunstkammer” museum approach, offering a dive into the history of collecting practices, hunting culture and overall ideas of human dominance over nature. The collaboration with Annette Messager, a renowned French artist famous for her close investigation of animality, seemed only a matter of time. However, this visual proximity with animal kingdom presents a curatorial challenge as it risks her works being read as an extension rather than commentary on the museum’s permanent collection.

THE EXHIBITION BY ANNETTE MESSAGER IN PARIS
Entering the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, one might encounter this peculiar interlacing of death and beauty, strangely feeling guilty about the aesthetic pleasure the permanent exhibition brings. One of the first thinkers to reshape our vision and relationship with the animal world was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, instead of affirming human dominance in the spirit of classical philosophy, argued that humans are closer to the animal world. In Annette Messager’s exhibition, the artist also brings a humanist dimension to the museum’s collection – with a certain level of intimacy and fragility, a lens that does not aestheticize the gruesome history of hunting in human culture, but rather reflects upon it. Through her gaze, these practices (as well as the logics of museum classification at large) seem to reveal a dominantly male optic, eternally linked with subordination, power, and cruelty. Messager offers a feminist approach to subvert this logic in a joyful way, revealing how language and images shape our surroundings with her installations, textile works, drawings and assemblages made of toys and found objects.
Throughout sixteen thematic rooms, Messager lowers the emotional strain traditionally associated with the display of taxidermied animals. The very first chapter, titled Théâtre de la Cruauté, confronts us directly with the notion of violence through L’Opération – a crucified rabbit with its plush entrails. It is followed by Douze petites effigies, which Messager calls “corpses of childhood”, as well as by a group of two taxidermied birds and an installation with hybrid-like sculptures incorporating plush elements. These works are accompanied by Vingt-deux expressions, a paper series composed of twenty-two French proverbs featuring animal imagery.The chapter captures some of Messager’s key methods: altar-like installations with photographs and series with proverbs. Through her work with bodily imagery and lexicon, she questions how images are classified and how language forms reality. Both seem to intersect in her universe.

THE WORKS BY ANNETTE MESSAGER
The journey continues on the first floor, where Messager’s objects subtly intervene in the museum’s permanent collection. The following chapters take place in rooms named after particular animals, an opportunity Messager did not miss to engage with. Sometimes her pieces from the same animal kingdom simply accompany the main display; sometimes they reframe it playfully, questioning not only the tradition of hunting but also the iconography of art itself. Like in La Flânerie de l’escargot: the snail in Christian iconography, being both a symbol of resurrection and virginity, is crucified in Messager’s oeuvre, uniting love and death in one entity. The same applies to the works from the chapter Sang des bêtes, which reinterpret the tradition of still life, where the absence of life presents itself as eternal continuity. The image of death and crucifixion act as a leitmotif of the exhibition: Messager has placed a taxidermied pair of birds that might recall the Lovers of Valdaro, or other stories of love preserved beneath ruins. A divine allegory of eternal but fragile feeling.
In Messager’s imagery, animal species do not only illustrate but possess agency; they offer us something to learn from. As in the sound installation Langage des oiseaux, conceived in 2022 for LaM in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, in which Messager mimics the language of birds, endlessly whispering the phrase “comme si”. Here, her interest in the animal world and human language intersects to bring us a hybrid form of reality, inviting us to learn to be as intelligent as beasts. The same applies to Le Miroire aux alouettes, where Messager recreates a lark trap to reflect upon a phrase that in French means something seductive but misleading. Whether emptied out through repetition or reshaped by history, words continue to circulate like birdsong, exposing the unstable nature of language.

THE MUSÉE DE LA CHASSE ET DE LA NATURE AND ANNETTE MESSAGER
One of the centres of the exhibition is Transports amoureux, a series of metallic sculptures uniting fragments of animal and human bodies, surrounded by still lifes by Jean-Siméon Chardin, a genre that seems to celebrate man’s victory over nature and abundance, where a feast of life contains a lesson on the vanity of existence. Surreal figures drawn straight from a Bosch-esque vocabulary create a strange feeling of estrangement and unease, which peaks in the next room with Bestiaire sentimental, a fan of five rabbits spinning endlessly, embodying the same futility of existence. Here we encounter one of Messager’s earliest alter egos – the Collector, who gathers taxidermied animals, names, or words associated with everyday sexism in Qualificatifs donnés aux femmes, album-collection n°35 (1972). This alter ego resonates perfectly with the museum’s own internal logic. For what is the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature if not an ode to the collector? To that first collector who, in the fifteenth century, began assembling cabinets of curiosity. Yet those cabinets were also monuments to power and the misogyny of men who proudly displayed their trophies on their walls. Instead, the traces left by Messager-the-Collector are deeply touching: a porcelain cat, broken bird figurines, a textile cat that we encounter on the second floor. The exhibition concludes with a question, posed through Mon coeur volé, a heart made of twigs covered with fishing nets that becomes an allegory of love’s infinite survival, as well as in Trois cagettes, in which metal crates are covered with the same nets – was the creature captured or rather protected? Though Messager reveals the taxonomic logis embedded in everyday language and objects, they remain unresolved within the museum itself. The idea well put in the exhibition text with the question: “And if art is a trap, does it not offer to capture the convulsive beauty so dear to André Breton, or the ‘naked animal thought’ celebrated by Valère Novarina?” The exhibition seems to perfectly transmit the diversity of practices Annette Messager has explored throughout her career without trying to overwhelm the viewer. The artist is known for working in series, and the curatorial approach united this logic with the museum’s thematic rooms and itinerary. Curiously, the exhibition unfolds as a loop, moving from large-scale installations to subtle interventions and back again. At times, her interventions seem to be way too hidden, up to a point of being overlooked, echoing Messager’s longstanding interest in uncovering hidden meanings and structures embedded in everyday life.

Luiza Gareeva

14 April – 20 September 2026
A swallow does not make spring
curated by Colin Lemoine
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
62, rue des Archives – Paris
https://www.chassenature.org/