Josephine Meckseper | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Lilienthal, Lower Saxony, Germany |
| Known for | installation, sculpture, painting, photography, film |
| Awards | John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship |
Josephine Meckseper is a German-born artist, based in New York City. [1] Her large-scale installations and films have been exhibited in various international biennials and museum shows worldwide.
Meckseper grew up in Worpswede, Germany, an artist community founded at the beginning of the 20th century, by a group of artists including Heinrich Vogeler (1872- 1942). [2] Vogeler was a diverse political artist and architect whose early work is situated within the Jugendstil movement, a German offspring of Art Nouveau. Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) and the writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), both lived in Worpswede for parts of their life.
Meckseper studied at Berlin University of the Arts in Germany from 1986–1990, and completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1992, [3] where she was influenced by artists Michael Asher and Charles Gaines, filmmaker Thom Andersen and literary critic and cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer. [4]
Meckseper's father is the renown German artist Friedrich Meckseper (1936-2019). [5]
Early Work: Meckseper’s first films time at CalArts coincided with the Gulf War and the Los Angeles riots, 1992; during this politically-charged period her first installations and films reflected upon the actions of the Situationist International who advocated experimentation with the construction of situations, namely setting up environments as alternatives to capitalist order. [6] Meckseper’s subsequent short films followed a similar principle and were filmed at Anti-capitalist and Anti-war protests in different parts of the world; as well as at the Mall of America in Minneapolis.
Meckseper’s film PELLEA[S], 2018 adapts the Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), weaving together fictional scenarios and dramatic footage captured by the artist at the 2017 presidential inauguration and the landmark women’s march that followed. Conflating contemporary political realities to Arnold Schoenberg’s modernist sound poem of Pelléas et Mélisande, the city of Washington, D.C. and its architecture become a context and site of departure, giving voice to debates around notions of gender found in the original play. Meckseper expresses through cinema the dramatic narratives and relationships contained within the universe of her signature glass and mirror vitrines, and draws a direct correlation to the way early Modernism and the avant-garde developed into a form of political and aesthetic resistance to classism and capitalism.
In 1994, Meckseper founded FAT Magazine, a conceptual magazine project distributed at newsstands and in supermarkets, but also exhibited in galleries and museums in the form of wallpaper. It was inspired by political theorist and radical publisher Jean-Paul Marat’s newspaper, published during the French Revolution called L'Ami du peuple and the avant-garde tradition of breaking down barriers between art and life. [7] Since 1994 Meckseper has published five issues: Good and Evil (1994); Surrender (1995/1996); on Fire (1997); Overflow (1999); Objectification (2018). [8]
While Meckseper’s earliest vitrine works commented on contemporary consumer culture using the shop window as an example and focus point for civic unrest and protest, documented in her film works, her later steel and glass vitrines, allude to the political dimension of early modernist Bauhaus display architecture and design between World War I and II in Weimar Germany. Meckseper melds the aesthetic language of early modernism with her own objects and paintings and footage of historical and political undercurrents, taking on a similar function as Mies van der Rohe’s well-known designs and glass structures for art collections: art and art history are on display. Often contained within Meckseper’s displays are paintings that nod to 20th century European modernist art, such as Russian constructivism. [10]
In 2012, her public art project Manhattan Oil Project, commissioned by the Art Production Fund, was installed on the corner of 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. [11] Consisting of two monumental kinetic sculptures modeled after mid-20th century oil pumps, these 25 feet tall sculptures were inspired by oil pumps that the artist discovered in Electra, a boarded-up town once famous for being the pump jack capital of Texas. Placed in a vacant lot next to Times Square, the fully motorized pump jacks recalled the ruins of ghost towns, forgotten monuments of America's decaying industrial past. [12]
In 2022, she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. [13]
Simon Starling is an English conceptual artist and won the Turner Prize in 2005.
Olaf Breuning is a Swiss-born artist, born in Schaffhausen, who lives in New York City.
Rachel Harrison is an American visual artist known for her sculpture, photography, and drawing. Her work often combines handmade forms with found objects or photographs, bringing art history, politics, and pop culture into dialogue with one another. She has been included in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the US, including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial and the Tate Triennial (2009). Her work is in the collections of major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London; among others. She lives and works in New York.
Kai Althoff is a German visual artist and musician.
Stefan Banz was an artist and curator.
Paul Thek was an American painter, sculptor and installation artist. Thek was active in both the United States and Europe, exhibiting several installations and sculptural works over the course of his life. Posthumously, he has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and his work is held in numerous collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Kolumba, the Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne.
Niele Toroni is a Swiss painter. He lives and works in Paris.
Cady Noland is an American postmodern conceptual sculptor and an internationally exhibited installation artist whose work deals with the failed promise of the American Dream and the divide between fame and anonymity, among other themes. Her work has been exhibited in museums and expositions including the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany. Noland is known for her reluctance to be publicly identified, having only ever allowed one photograph of herself to be publicly released, and for her numerous disputes and lawsuits with museums, galleries, and collectors over their handling of her work. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and is the daughter of the Color Field painter Kenneth Noland.
Olivier Mosset is a Swiss visual artist. He lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.
Dani Gal is an artist and a filmmaker, born 1975 in Jerusalem, lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Thea Djordjadze is a contemporary German-Georgian artist based in Berlin, Germany. She is best known for sculpture and installation art, but also works in a variety of other media.
Marc Bauer is an artist best known for his works in the graphic medium, primarily drawing.
Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss conceptual artist currently living and working in Berlin. He utilises a wide range of artistic approaches including photography, performance, sculpture, and video to address concepts relating to time and human's relationship to the natural world.
Anicka Yi is a conceptual artist whose work lies at the intersection of fragrance, cuisine, and science. She is known for installations that engage the senses, especially the sense of smell; and, for her collaborations with biologists and chemists. Yi lives and works in New York City.
Annette Kelm is a German contemporary artist and photographer who is particularly known as a conceptual artist. Kelm uses medium or large format cameras in her work, creating still life and portraits. She favours using analog photography methods in her work.
The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum for contemporary art in Zürich, Switzerland. The museum was founded in 1996.
Kerstin Kartscher is a German artist who lives and works in London. Her central medium is drawing. Often her works evolve out of combining finely detailed drawings with found objects, or man made materials, that can be merged in installations. Kartscher creates drawings and installations of imaginary worlds populated by nameless heroines who celebrate their femininity, liberated from social, emotional and psychological constraints, within fantastical, elegant and immense landscapes.
Maria Eichhorn is a German artist based in Berlin. She is best known for site-specific works and installations that investigate political and economic systems, often revealing their intrinsic absurdity or the extent to which we normalize their complex codes and networks. She represented Germany at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Ida Ekblad is a Norwegian artist who works across painting, sculpture, installation and poetry.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite web}}: External link in |title={{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
