Andrea Rosen Gallery Exhibits Josephine Meckseper's New Work, Now thru 1/18
JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER
Today, November 23, 2013 - January 18, 2014
Opening reception: November 22 from 6:00 - 8:00pmAndrea Rosen Gallery
525 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011The addition of artists to the program is always an exciting moment to reaffirm the gallery's commitment to showing the most meaningful and important work of our time, and so it is with great pride that Andrea Rosen Gallery announces Josephine Meckseper's first exhibition with the gallery.Meckseper's new work attempts to construct the present as archaeology and to create a window into a historic past at the same time. The exhibition will feature large-scale vitrines, mirror wall panels and photographic works that reveal a historical link between contemporary consumer display forms and their early twentieth century precursors. While Meckseper's earlier vitrine works commented on contemporary consumer culture using the shop window as an example and focus point for civic unrest and protest in our late capitalist society, her current works allude to the political dimension of early modernist display architecture and design between World War I and II in Weimar Germany. Where the artist's previous work pointed to the instability of capitalism and often included photographs taken by the artist at political protests, the works in the current exhibition refer to the rise of the Bauhaus and Deutscher Werkbund and their imminent destruction through the Nazi regime. Evoking the modernist architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion and the way in which it framed a single sculpture by Georg Kolbe, Meckseper's vitrines both show how works are contingent on environment and context and how they can become subject to the vicissitudes of external ideologies. The stainless steel and glass vitrines in her current exhibition house arrangements of early twentieth century inspired hand made sculpture casts and paintings, 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 here on display.
Josephine Meckseper was born in Lilienthal, Germany, and studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and CalArts, Los Angeles, where she received her MFA. Meckseper is currently preparing for a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Germany, in 2014. Most recently, her work was exhibited throughout the permanent collection and public spaces of Parrish Art Museum during their first summer season in their new Herzog & De Meuron building. Meckseper's first public project in New York, Manhattan Oil Project, was commissioned by Art Production Fund and installed in a lot adjacent to Times Square in 2012. A major retrospective was organized by the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, in 2007. Meckseper's work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and the Hammer Museum, UCLA. The artist lives and works in New York.
Videos
