Josephine Meckseper
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Josephine Meckseper (b.1964, Lilienthal, Germany) is an artist based in New York.
Meckseper studied at Hochschule der Kunste [1]in Berlin from 1986-1990, and completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts [2] in 1992.
Meckseper’s has exhibited in several important exhibitions including “The Whitney Biennale” at the Whitney Museum of American Art [3] in New York, “USA Today” [4] at The Royal Academy [5] in London, and the 2005 Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon [6] in France. Her work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums such as the Oldenburger Kunstverein [7] and Kunsthalle Nuernberg [8] in Germany, and the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst [9] in Zurich. She is represented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery [10] in New York and Reinhard Huff in Stuttgart [11].
Josephine Meckseper’s stylish installations build on the precedents of Haim Steinbach’s [12] juxtaposed objects and the random associations of 1990s Scatter art [13]. Appropriating readymade forms, Meckseper’s assemblages incorporate existing consumer products to reveal the complex system of affiliations found in everyday objects. She uses display cases and department store shelving to reconceive the art gallery as a boutique, a cultural arena where aesthetics merge with ideologies and politics, levelling all as capitalist bi-products. Through her arrangements, Meckseper packages contemporary zeitgeist as an uber-commodity, glamorising problems of class, gender, war and political dissent as desirable wares of choice.
Using the format of mass media to disseminate ‘instant replay’ criticism, Meckseper draws on her experience as a photojournalist to exhibit her own documentation of public demonstrations. Presented with the cool neutrality of front-line reportage, these images don’t promote a political agenda, but examine the phenomenon of radicalism as youth fashion. Their brutality stands in stark contrast to Meckseper’s staged photos, which mimic designer brand advertisements to encapsulate extremist ideologies, such as fascism and terrorism, as modes of elitist assimilation. Through her work, Meckseper analyses how cultural information and its inherent values are merchandised. Beauty, capitalism and glamour are laid bare and magnified to reveal their social, political and economic realities.
