The multimedia artist Josephine Meckseper frequently works in installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and film. Her work critiques our modern world of constant, unending consumerism and the politics of power behind that system of endless desires. She uses common forms of commercial presentation such as vitrines, window displays, and magazines, to demonstrate the influences of consumer culture on society and the individual. Through the appropriation of images, mostly advertising and fashion, Meckseper investigates the semantic codes of advertising to address issues of power and consumerism. Of her multimedia installations the artist says, “The objects create a tension between their own materiality and the illusion of an urban landscape of infinite demand and supply. They also explore the relationship of the vitrine window and the objects to viewers, as well as to an abstract world outside of our human perception.” While she is known for her installations that include elaborate vitrine displays, the artist also captures her own images (as well as appropriating others’). 

The reflective surfaces of tall skyscrapers mimic the reflective fragmented mirror. A woman sees herself as part of the contemporary cityscape, a modern woman fading into the metropolis, as the two meld together. She is singular, yet her individualism is nearly depleted as she is engulfed into the chasm of the cosmopolitan city. There is a beautifully bright blue sky that holds seductively shiny buildings, and yet a doom is inherent in the woman’s disappearance. Meckseper was inspired by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, his final and unfinished volume investigating the modern shopping mall and the fragmentation of modern life.    

Josephine Meckseper was born in Lilienthal, Germany. She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (1986-90) and received her master’s degree from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles. She started the conceptual magazine project FAT (1994-2000) where she edited four issues. She completed a public art project titled Manhattan Oil Project (2012), commissioned by the Art Production Fund, which was installed on the corner of 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. Her exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of Fine Art in New York, NY; the Royal Academy in London, UK; and the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, Switzerland; the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography exhibit (2008-2009); the Whitney Biennial (2006, 2010); 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, Seville (2006); Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007); Sharjah Biennial (2011); Taipei Biennial (2014), among others. Her works are collected by such institutions as Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. In 2022, she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Meckseper lives and works in New York City.