Timothy Taylor

Featuring twelve works by New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper, the online exhibition provides an insight into Meckseper’s ongoing conceptual investigation into to the cultural currents of our time. The exhibition brings together works created between 2013-2019 with new works completed at the artist’s studios in Manhattan and Long Island, New York, during the global coronavirus pandemic. A portion of the proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to UN Women USA, in support of women and girls adversely affected by COVID-19 internationally.

In GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (2015), honoring the legacy of Jean-Luc Godard’s eponymous film, painted traces of film perforation create an affinity to the ‘frame’ in cinematography. An ominous splash of black paint looms at its centre, summoning the shape of the United States on a map, while a striped sock evokes the human cost of repressive migration laws. ONE PLUS ONE (2015) depicts chancellor Angela Merkel striding forward as the sole woman in a group of male politicians.

Meckseper’s glass vitrines in the exhibition, take on a new resonance in light of the economic devastation created in the wake of the global pandemic. In the artist’s words: ‘For me, the vitrines have become referents for the disappearance of the local shop windows that we’re now seeing all over Manhattan. They now become emblems of a past cityscape, in the same way that pre-pandemic movies now become reminders of the world the way it was before.’

Meckseper created recent works such as Untitled (AC 03), and Untitled (Chain), 2020 using the available materials in her studio at the beginning of the pandemic: mirrors, chains and various objects. In keeping with the dialogue between different mediums in Meckseper’s practice, the new paintings see physical forms from her earlier sculptures and vitrines transformed into silhouettes. Abstractions such as chains in these works become metaphors for the struggle for a more just society, while neon paint splashes became referents for the shape of the virus. At once abstract and concrete, the new artworks form a narrative arc with the rest of Meckseper’s practice by holding up an alternative mirror to our world.