Solo Exhibition

What you are looking at

The installation view shows a vast, raw industrial hall with a polished concrete floor, exposed steel roof trusses and strip lights. At left, a freestanding white wall holds a long glass vitrine framed in gold-toned metal, laid out like a shop window with an assortment of objects: printed images, a vase, small colorful graphics and other items arranged in careful rows. In the middle distance stands a sculpture in the form of an oil pump jack, painted in black and glossy red, its walking beam tilted as if frozen mid-stroke. At right, an enormous black-and-white image covers a whole wall, showing a curved industrial form, like the rim of a wheel or a gear, against a cloudy sky.

The three elements set up the exhibition's vocabulary: the commercial display, the machinery of oil extraction, and the large-scale photographic image.

About the exhibition

At the invitation of the Frac des Pays de la Loire, the regional contemporary art collection, the German-born, New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper presented her first solo show in a French institution across two venues in 2019: the Hab Galerie in Nantes, from 9 February to 21 April, and the Frac's building at Carquefou, near Nantes, from 9 March to 26 May. The show surveyed roughly fifteen years of her work and also included some twenty works by other artists, mostly women, chosen by Meckseper from the Frac collection. A monograph published by the Frac and Sternberg Press followed in 2020.

The artist's themes

Meckseper is known for vitrines that borrow the language of department-store windows, mixing designer goods, cheap merchandise, political pamphlets and fragments of her own works, so that consumer desire and political protest share the same glass case. Her sculptures of oil pump jacks, reproduced in polished, fashion-like colors, link the glamour of consumer culture to the oil economy that underpins it. Films and large photographs extend these juxtapositions.

Meaning

Installed in a former industrial building, the work gains an extra layer: the language of shop windows and oil machinery inside a space once used for work and trade. Critics have described Meckseper's approach as a critique of late capitalism that adopts the seductive surfaces it criticizes, leaving viewers caught between attraction and unease.

Further viewing

For individual works by the artist in the catalogue, see Here and Elsewhere, Masculine Feminine and Scene VI, or the artist page for Josephine Meckseper.