Masculine Feminine

Masculine Feminine is a wall work by Josephine Meckseper, the German-born artist based in New York, known for combining the visual language of consumer display with abstract painting and political imagery. According to our records it is made of acrylic sheeting, acrylic paint, paper and wood, mounted in an aluminum frame, and it is square, about 122.9 centimeters on each side. We have not confirmed its date.

What you are looking at

The work is a shallow box in a dark metal frame. Its front is a sheet of tinted acrylic, gray-violet in color, through which the layers inside are seen as if through a shop window or a smoked glass.

Behind the tinted surface, several kinds of image are combined. At upper left, a black blot spreads out in a rough grid of horizontal and vertical strokes, with drips running down from it, like a splash of ink caught in a net. At upper right, a thick vertical bar of black paint is joined by two smaller strokes of yellow. In the center right is a small photograph of a white rabbit, soft and slightly blurred. Below it is a black-and-white collage of abstract shapes, like a fragment of a modernist print. In the lower right corner, black painted forms read as the legs of an upturned stool or a construction of beams. Along the lower edge, smears of gray and white and a dark horizontal stroke suggest a wiped or erased surface.

The overall effect is muted and cool: color filtered through the plastic, with only the yellow and the white of the rabbit standing out.

How to read it

The title echoes Masculin féminin (1966), Jean-Luc Godard's film about young people in Paris, consumer culture and politics, which described its characters as "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." Meckseper has often drawn on 1960s film and protest imagery, though we have not found a statement in which she explains this particular title.

The work sets familiar signs against one another. The gestural black marks recall the "masculine" heroics of postwar abstract painting, while the rabbit, an image of softness associated with advertising and with Playboy's logo, brings in commercial femininity. Seen through the tinted acrylic, all of them become equally glossy surfaces, like goods behind glass. That flattening of art, desire and politics into display is a constant theme in Meckseper's work.

Where to see it

We have not been able to confirm the current owner. Meckseper's works are held in public collections in the United States and Europe and shown regularly in galleries. See also Here and Elsewhere, May she. Have hear. Birds. and Filmtract Nº1, and the Josephine Meckseper page.