SculptureCenter Presents Josephine Meckseper

SculptureCenter, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, continues the artist-led lecture series Subjective Histories of Sculpture. This program, initiated in 2006, furthers SculptureCenter's exploration of how contemporary artists think about sculpture; its history and its legacies. This year, three artists have been invited to present their own take on art history: Lucy Skaer, Nairy Baghramian, and Josephine Meckseper. Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside art, these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture's evolving strategies.

Josephine Meckseper examines a pertinent dimension of our material world, representing practices that foreground art objects as commodities. She explores not only connections with the art market, but also how objects can escape meaning, status, and fixed purpose with changing contexts and configurations. Through carefully arranged installations, photographs, and videos, Meckseper exposes the relationship between politics and the consumer worlds of advertising and fashion. She presents various hybridized forms of display that comment on the homogenous culture that capitalism has created. Meckseper looks for new ways to subvert normative mass culture in order to re-contextualize images and signs that have become inflated from over-proliferation. Positioning objects such as a toilet plunger, a stuffEd White rabbit, and perfume bottles, the artist's work reveals the absurdity of materialism's manifestations.

Josephine Meckseper was born in 1964 in Lilienthal, Germany; she is currently living and working in New York City. Through carefully arranged installations, photographs, and videos, Meckseper exposes the relationship between politics and the consumer worlds of advertising and fashion. Her signature installations present various hybridized forms of display that comment on the homogenous culture that capitalism has created. Meckseper's work was included in recent international group exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery, London, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Galerie des Galeries, Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. She was also included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Subjective Histories of Sculpture: Josephine Meckseper
Monday, April 9, 2012
6:30pm