Josephine Meckseper
1964–
Josephine Meckseper left Germany in 1990 to attend the California Institute of the Arts and moved to New York, where she is still based, in 1992. Her stay in Southern California had a profound impact on the development of her practice, which examines links between politics, corporate capitalism, and consumerism. The shopping malls, car culture, and social unrest that were part of Meckseper’s experience in Los Angeles inform the content of her photographs, films, videos, installations, paintings, and sculpture. She is perhaps best known for her displays of invented shopping vitrines that she began in 2000 and that she frequently exhibits alongside imagery of political demonstrations, suggesting scenarios of cause and effect. As Meckseper has unequivocally explained, “The basic foundation of my work is a critique of capitalism.”
For The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art, Meckseper assembled a discordant array of commercial products and political symbols. (One of the latter, held by a stuffed and rotating rabbit, alludes to France’s 2005 referendum on the EU constitution.) The stylized display references both a department store window and an ethnographic museum, presenting a range of juxtapositions—what she referred to as the “contradictions and absurdities” of the objects exhibited. Her critique foregrounds the persistent conflation of consumption, politics, and art— a point underscored by the work’s title. The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art asserts that consumer manipulation extends to recent art, articulating the artist’s belief that “contemporary art today tends to be complicit in the prevailing rapacious market economy.”
Introduction
Josephine Meckseper is a German-born artist, based in New York City. Her large-scale installations and films have been exhibited in various international biennials and museum shows worldwide.
Wikidata identifier
Q92498
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 27, 2025.
Country of birth
Germany
Roles
Artist, installation artist
ULAN identifier
500126087
Names
Josephine Meckseper
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 27, 2025.
