Annette Messager L’Amour et la Mort, Cupidon, l’enfant dieu de l’amour, au lieu de tirer des flèches, tient un pinceau et dessine la mort. La mort à son tour dessine l’enfant

Annette Messager draws her inspiration from the humble, prosaic and domestic everyday life of women, as well as from folk art and art brut. Psychoanalysis and childhood also inspire her work.
With L'Amour et la Mort, she delivers a moving diptych, bringing together love, life, death and art.

This graceful, elegant acrylic wash, with its wry humor, depicts Eros and Thanatos, face to face in a cruel, unequal game. It depicts Cupid painting death and, in a mirror image, death in turn painting the child, god of love.
Its reading plays on the evocation of ancient mythology, while resorting to an apparent simplicity of means, with an aesthetic that evokes that of inkblots, where subtle forms are revealed in which we seek to read the reflection of our thoughts and emotions.

The choice of inks, papers and printing technique, heliogravure, was the subject of discussions between the artist and the taille-doucier craftsman at the Rmn- Grand Palais printing workshop in Saint Denis.
The two plates are printed in black ink in a single pass under the press, on the same horizontal plane, with a gap of 1 cm between the two coppers.