Although Annette Messager is now ranked among France's leading contemporary artists, she struggled against fierce male prejudice at the outset of her career. Back then, in the late 1960s, virtually all the prominent French artists were men. "There was a lot of misogyny in France," she recalls with an ironic shrug.
We are sitting in Concrete, the aptly named brutalist café at the Hayward Gallery on London's South Bank. Messager, whose first British retrospective exhibition will open here in March, seems tense and almost withdrawn when I meet her. Slim, with close-cropped, red-tinged hair and wearing jeans, she looks very private. But this guardedness is an illusion. Immediately I produce my notebook, she exclaims: "You are left-handed! I was once, but my teachers forced me to use my right hand. It disturbed me, and that's the reason I became an artist."
