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-	Pierre Bonnard
-	Jean-Michel Basquiat
-	Max Ernst
-	Diane Arbus
-	Georgia O'Keeffe
-	Cy Twombly
-	Max Beckmann
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-	Roy Lichtenstein
-	Edvard Munch
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-	Man Ray
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Josephine Meckseper

artist's work | biography | articles | other resources

Selected Works by Josephine Meckseper

Josephine Meckseper I Love Jesus 2005 Aluminum, Plexiglas, glass, lights, C-print, metal display stands, plastic mannequin leg, argyle sock, found jewelry, gouache and tape on inkjet print mounted on cardboard, toilet brush, feather duster, acrylic on glass ball, glass vases. 226.1 x 116.8 x 45.7 cm	Click on images to enlarge
Often using department store display cases and sales ephemera, Josephine Meckseper conceives the art gallery as boutique: a cultural arena where aesthetics merge with ideologies, politics, and lifestyle axioms, levelling all as capitalist bi-product. Originally conceived as a window dressing in NY’s Chelsea district, I Love Jesus hosts images of political protest intermingled with yuppie footwear, bijou trinkets, and pristine cleaning utensils, offset by a placard reading ‘please excuse our appearance’. Adapting the strategies of hard-sell, Meckseper promotes the diaspora of American culture and its (dis)contents as enviable status symbols.
Josephine Meckseper Talk to Cindy 2005 Aluminum, Plexiglas, glass, lights, metal display stands, painted toilet plunger, ink jet print mounted on cardboard underwear box, found jewelry, gouache and tape on inkjet print mounted on cardboard, found metal scrubber, found jewelry, glass ball, gouache on plastic sign. 226.1 x 116.8 x 45.7 cm
In Talk To Cindy Meckseper makes witty juxtaposition of lingerie, consumer brands, and an exquisite toilet plunger. Through these arrangements, Meckseper packages contemporary zeitgeist as an uber-commodity, glamorising problems of class, gender, war, and political dissent as desirable products of choice. Initially shown in the street front window at Meckseper’s New York gallery, several of the displayed items were made by inmates of the adjacent women’s prison. Drawing reference to corporate corruption and social dysfunction, Meckseper implicates art as a transgressive activity born of hierarchy and manipulation.
Josephine Meckseper Selling out 2004 Window display with mixed media 78 x 148 x 35 cm
Josephine Meckseper’s Selling Out reconstitutes ‘radical chic’ as a protest in itself. Mimicking both department store display and museum case, Meckseper presents an array of affluent goods for the 'consummate terrorist', framing the banality of consumer fetish as a time capsule of political unrest. Centring her arrangement around a publication on 70s anarchy bombers The Angry Brigade, Meckseper alludes to an subversive coffeetable-isation of violence, setting media, advertising, and middle class values as a backdrop of cultural anxiety and revolution.
Josephine Meckseper Occident – Orient (RUG NO.3) 2004 Mixed Fabrics 139 X 270 cm
Pieced together from Palestinian fabric, Occident Orient patchworks a conflicting system of ethics arising from globalism. Drawing attention to the adaptation of meaning, Josephine Meckseper’s scarves reference both traditional Muslim headdress and trustafarian style, entwining capitalism and its consequences in a personalised item of individual conscience. Swatches and bands of colour emerge as both Minimalist and Constructivist associations; ideological territories mapped out and merged as an opulent fashion accessory.
Josephine Meckseper CDU-CSU 2001 C-Print 106 x 165.5 cm
Labelling her sultry and seductive models with German political party vanity chains identifying the joint Christian Democratic and Christian Socialist Union, Jospehine Meckseper spin-doctors a media savvy image parodying the right wing. Meckseper’s enlarged faux magazine spread updates traditional allegorical painting via woman’s fashion advert, drawing veiled reference to Angela Merkel, the party’s leader and Germany’s first female chancellor. Raising uneasy questions about class, power, nationalism, and feminism, Meckseper portrays her homeland as a twinned stealth-like beauty: Arian perfection garbed in democratic coloured designer gowns, languishing in extravagance and oblivious to the proletariat maid lingering in the distance.
Josephine Meckseper Untitled 2005 Mannequin, fabric, found jewelry, inkjet print on fabric, acrylic and fabric on canvas. Mannequin: 144.8 x 66 x 43.8 cm Painting: 61 x 61 cm Collage: 41 x 41 cm
Taking her cues from the likes of Bret Easton Ellis, Josephine Meckseper’s installations mirror the nihilist horror of middle class lifestyle. Turning an art exhibition into department store display, Meckseper’s mannequin poses before a gallery hang in hoodie and scarf, the ensemble of choice for both activists and thugs. Ironically coordinated with a stylish abstract painting, and the cover of a terrorist biography, Meckseper’s model creates a totality of image: reflecting a social elite as both cause and symptom of cultural turmoil.
Josephine Meckseper Ubi Pedes Ibi. Patria. (Where the feet are, there is the fatherland) 2006 Shoes, display carousel 153 x 83cm
Reminiscent of Haim Steinbach’s appropriated objects, Josephine Meckseper’s assemblages recode the familiar through associative interpretation. In Shoes, Meckseper presents the tacky display of a discount store as a slack readymade; its shoddy products simply stand in for themselves as uncanny totems of commodity failure. It’s only through relational affiliation that Meckseper’s remnant footwear takes horrifying form, echoing connotations of poverty, economic migration, the Marcos’s dictatorship, and Holocaust images of piled shoes. Gathering dust beneath blazing orange sale signs, Meckseper marks down wholesale cultural barbarity to bargain basement affordability.
Josephine Meckseper Pyromaniac 2 2003 C-Print 101 x 76 cm
Josphine Meckseper’s photographs subtly infuse lifestyle ideals with an incitement to revolutionary violence. Using the format of fashion magazines, Meckseper examines how cultural information and its inherent values are packaged and merchandised: beauty, capitalism, and glamour are laid bare and magnified as vacuous imagery transparently revealing their social, political, and economic realities. In Pyromaniac 2, Meckseper’s model is posed with lit match perched between her lips, an emblem of commodified desire transformed to an impending powder keg explosion.
Josephine Meckseper Untitled (Berlin Demonstration, Fire, Cops) 2002 C-Print 76 x 101 cm
Having worked as a photojournalist for German media, Josephine Meckseper’s demonstration photos capture the cool neutrality of front-line reportage. Shot at a riot near the former GDR HQ, Untitled’s dramatic subject matter neither advocates nor denounces political concern. Photographing protesters, police, and bystanders participating in their expected roles, her images of violent unrest allude to a choreographed theatre, the readily identifiable aesthetics of protest culture transfiguring as stereotyped vogue. In Untitled, a shopping cart blazes against a crowd of cops and demonstrators, framing the iconography of anti-capitalist sentiment as implicitly commercialised fashion.
Josephine Meckseper RAF Tray 2002 C-Print 50.8 x 40.6 cm
Printed in black and white, Josphine Meckseper’s RAF Tray is reminiscent of the ambient class of perfume adverts, the drama of classic film, and the radical chic of 60s political photos. Staged by Meckseper, her models exude this expectant glamour, femmes fatales peddling image over content. Proffering box of matches on a silver platter, they offer revolution as a bi-product of their conflicting values, sparking a dissident solution to the boredom of privilege.
Josephine Meckseper Untitled (Berlin Demonstration, Police Brigade) 2002 C-Print 76 x 101 cm
Photographing public demonstrations, Josephine Meckseper embraces an alternative politic of the contradictory messages contained within visual culture. Highlighting the trendy youth culture adaptation of protest chic, Meckseper shoots a line of riot-geared police officers flanked by the impressive columns of government buildings, framing the overlapping connotations of authority, violence, oppression, security, and heroism with the casual flair of a Gap advertisement.
Josephine Meckseper Tout Va Bien 2005 Mixed media in display window 160 x 250.2 x 60 cm
Appropriating readymade forms, Josephine Meckseper’s assemblages use existing consumer products to reference the complex system of affiliations found in everyday objects. In Tout Va Bien, her showcase combines found and collaged fashion posters with Hugo Boss underwear, ladies hosiery, spangly designer lamp, and loo roll, a pair of suggestive glass bobbles, and an arabesque tower comprised of cola cans and home accessories. Through juxtaposing these disparate wares, Meckseper dissects and reconstitutes they’re layered associations of sexuality, politics, culture, and class. Echoed from behind by a small cracked mirror, Meckseper’s menagerie is reflected as damaged goods, massively discounted beneath the sales sign etched in the window pane.
Josephine Meckseper The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art 2005 Mixed media in display window 160 x 250.2 x 60 cm
Through her installations, Jospehine Meckseper frames consumerism as a form of protest of choice; her products become activated beyond their saleable function by their staged conjunctions to both contemporary zeitgeist and art history. In The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art, Meckseper utilises the stream of consciousness process of 90s scatter art: as products stand in for themselves humorous associations emerge, as stuffed rabbit, upside down pinups, and patterned stockings wittily implicate Beuys, Baselitz, and Vasarely as models of cultural consumption.
Josephine Meckseper Untitled (End Democracy) 2005 Inkjet print, Plexiglas, plastic mannequin torso, metal stand, mirror on wood 144 x 122 x 122 cm
Josephine Meckseper Untitled (End Democracy) (Detail) 2005 Inkjet print, Plexiglas, plastic mannequin torso, metal stand, mirror on wood 144 x 122 x 122 cm
Josephine Meckseper’s Untitled (End Democracy) uses minimalist aesthetic as a tool of numbing seduction. Set atop a display unit reminiscent of Robert Morris’s mirrored cubes, Meckseper presents a lingerie shop mannequin and a Communist rally poster, converting their cold manufactured presence into a monument of classical heroism. Reflecting its surrounds, Untitled exudes an entrancing charisma, encapsulating all as equal its torpid and alluring wake.
Josephine Meckseper Blow Up (Michelli) 2006 Mixed media in display vitrine 208.3 x 243.8 x 68.6 cm