Josephine Meckseper

Josephine Meckseper  (b. 1964 Lilienthal, Germany) is a conceptual artist who lives and works in New York. Her installations and films challenge the conventional reading of familiar cultural imagery and the systems of circulation and display. The artist is known for her large-scale vitrines that meld the aesthetic language of early modernism with her own images of contemporary and historical undercurrents. Her assemblage wall works similarly encompass a variety of media–simultaneously exposing and encasing cultural signifiers and everyday objects.

Meckseper has participated in two Whitney Biennials; the Sharjah Biennial; the Taipei Biennial; and the NGV Triennial, Melbourne among other biennials. In 2007 she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. For her 2012 kinetic public artwork Manhattan Oil Project, the artist mounted two life-size oil pump sculptures adjacent to Times Square. Meckseper’s film Pellea[s], 2018 expresses through cinema the dramatic narratives contained within the universe of her glass and mirror vitrines. Meckseper was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2022. She received her Master’s degree in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts, where she was influenced by the conceptual artists Michael Asher and Charles Gaines as well as the experimental filmmaker Thom Anderson.