Le grenier du château (“The Castle Attic”)

Inaugurated in 1985 by the Département de la Haute-Vienne, the museum has built up a remarkable collection over the past 40 years, which today includes more than 2,000 works by renowned international artists.

Some of these works, such as Le grenier du château (“The castle attic”) by Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski, were created specifically for the castle and have become iconic in the museum’s history. To celebrate the institution’s 40^th anniversary, this installation is once again being presented to the public.

Le grenier du château was created as part of the exhibition Contes d’été (“Summer tales”) in 1990. This work is the fruit of the second collaboration between Christian Boltanski (1944 – 2021) and Annette Messager (b.1943). It requires the entire top floor of the museum. Covering an area of over 200m², the installation is composed of 12 rows of hanging sheets.

On these sheets, Annette Messager has pinned miniature black-and-white pictures of body fragments and naive drawings. She has embroidered words like “uncertainty” and “jealousy”, and painted ghostly yet marvelous figures in animal blood. Christian Boltanski, for his part, hung several garments and designed the showcase at the entrance to the exhibition.

In the words of the artists themselves, this poetic work is meant, above all, to evoke the attics of yesteryear, where laundry was hung out to dry, and which also constituted a favorite playground for children.

The audience finds itself at the heart of a laundry maze, and is invited to take a slow, sinuous initiatory journey. Row after row, the journey through what becomes a moving labyrinth reveals itself to be a strange, captivating journey through the stages of life: from the first linen wrapping an infant to the shroud covering the deceased, via the sheets of the nuptial bed.

To complete the exhibition, the tour ends with the presentation of a recent museum acquisition, La pudeur (“The prudishness”) made in 2022. Created by Gyan Panchal (b. 1973), this work, composed of a windsock, reflects the artist’s interest in everyday goods, which he hijacks and reinvests with a poetic charge. An undulating sculpture with a fleeting erection, the work rises at regular intervals to reveal its pink, silky form, imbued with sensuality.