The procession goes inside. Alicia Chillida

This is the first retrospective exhibition in Spain of Annette Messager's work, and is articulated through a set of 50 works that make up a series of thematic rooms that illustrate Messager's position as an artist and her obsessions; among them identity, sex, childhood, madness, life, death, religion, magic or fetishism.

Annette Messager was born in Berck (France) in 1943 and from an early age she developed an artistic inclination. In the early 1960s she moved to Paris and won a photography contest organized by Kodak, whose prize was a trip around the world. Messager was deeply impressed by the great variety of images and cultures of the countries she visited, especially by the Indian culture and miniatures and by the combination of images and text in the latter. This combination is present in much of her work: in My collection of proverbs 1974, the text embroidered on canvas has an intimate and very feminine aspect, and at the same time subversive; in other works the text takes on a monumental aspect as in Protection 1998, where the dismembered bodies of stuffed animals form the word protection on the wall.

Heiress of the French May '68, she belongs to a generation of artists who question and rethink the way of producing art and the traditional role of artistic genres under the slogan "art is in the streets, not in museums". Messager is interested in objectives and values considered "minor", from which she draws and appropriates: everyday objects, traditionally associated with a feminine environment such as wool, string, stuffed animals and paper, combined with other souvenirs such as stuffed animals and photography.

At the same time, the feminist movement began to take an important position. However, the author thinks that taking an active part in it would mean denying her femininity, something she was not willing to accept, as she feels that being a woman and being an artist are inextricably linked. Much of her work revolves around the theme of identity and what it means to be a woman in society, women's obsessions with their bodies and their physical appearance: My witness clichés, The men I love, The men I do not love, Women-men and Men-women, all of them from 1972.

Taxidermy (Pensioners' rest, 1971-72, Masks, 1992) and photography are for the artist the same thing: taxidermy "freezes" the animal, and keeps it "alive", photography also "freezes" an image. Moreover, both represent images and objects that are perceived as both illusory and real. This ambiguous component between reality and falsification is present throughout his work, "all my work revolves around imitation, or the false".

In works such as the large installation Dependence-Independence, 1995-96, it is the spectator himself who, on entering it, generates the contact between the different elements that compose it: photographs, wool threads, colored pencils, words on canvas. At Dueling games, the interaction of the spectator with the work and its staging is very cinematographic and theatrical. Messager uses nets "as funeral curtains of a perverse theater", where she puts into practice her research on ambiguity, gender mixing and the confrontation of opposites: masculine and feminine, inside and outside, madness and sanity...

Messager's work offers a strong component of exhibitionism and voyeurism, the spectator is directly confronted with the innocent and at the same time perverse games, which make him reflect on his own contradictions and ask himself how collective representations and social constructions can be altered in their transcendence, by means of an individual interpretation.