Josephine Meckseper makes collages, shelves and vitrines that resemble store windows, with disparate objects on display apparently for consumption. Her works reconstruct the worlds of contemporary advertising and fashion as a way of critiquing the political implications of the iconography of consumer culture. During her time in Los Angeles during the 1990s, while she was studying at CalArts, she became interested in situationist strategies and staged happenings with fellow students that revolved around the techniques of "turning things on their heads and adding fuel to the fire." This desire to upend unquestioned assumptions about the political underpinning of contemporary culture continues through her work, which, as the artist puts it, "mimics retail aesthetics in order to activate the commercial zone into a political one."
Josephine Meckseper was born in 1964 in Lilienthal, Germany. She lives and works in New York.