Josephine Meckseper

(Germany) b.1964

Lives and works in New York

Josephine Meckseper is a New York-based artist whose works conflate the aesthetic language of modernism with the formal languages of commercial display and advertising. In her shop window installations, large-scale display sculptures and films, Meckseper exposes the paradoxes of consumer culture through the combination of mass-produced objects with images and artifacts of historical and political events.

For TB2014, Meckseper presents two installations: Urban Climate and Bright Bay Cars/Gratis (both 2013).In Urban Climate, the artist uses store display slatwall panels, metal fixtures, fluorescent lights and a canvas print of a tree that served as a shelter for protesters against an urban development in Germany. The work Bright Bay Cars/Gratis is a vitrine containing a cast concrete torso, an undulating Brancusi-like sculpture, and an abstract painting with an aluminum car advertisement on the reverse side. Housed in an eight-foot-tall case of blackened steel and glass, the vitrine reflects upon the way early modernism and the avant-garde developed forms of political and aesthetic resistance to classicism and capitalism. 

Meckseper’s work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, UCLA; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. A major retrospective on her work was organized by the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany in 2007. Meckseper’s large-scale public project, Manhattan Oil Project, was commissioned by Art Production Fund and installed in a lot adjacent to Times Square, New York in 2012.

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