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22/11/2013

Two exhibitions

Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Josephine Meckseper
Main Gallery

The addition of artists to the program is always an exciting moment to reaffirm the gallery’s commitment to showing the most meaningful and important work of our time, and so it is with great pride that Andrea Rosen Gallery announces Josephine Meckseper’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Meckseper’s new work attempts to construct the present as archaeology and to create a window into a historic past at the same time. The exhibition will feature large-scale vitrines, mirror wall panels and photographic works that reveal a historical link between contemporary consumer display forms and their early 20th century precursors. While Meckseper’s earlier vitrine works commented on contemporary consumer culture using the shop window as an example and focus point for civic unrest and protest in our late capitalist society, her current works allude to the political dimension of early modernist display architecture and design between World War I and II in Weimar Germany.

Where the artist’s previous work pointed to the instability of capitalism and often included photographs taken by the artist at political protests, the works in the current exhibition refer to the rise of the Bauhaus and Deutscher Werkbund and their imminent destruction through the Nazi regime. Evoking the modernist architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and the way in which it framed a single sculpture by Georg Kolbe, Meckseper’s vitrines both show how works are contingent on environment and context and how they can become subject to the vicissitudes of external ideologies. The stainless steel and glass vitrines in her current exhibition house arrangements of early 20th century inspired hand made sculpture casts and paintings, taking on a similar function as Mies van der Rohe’s well-known designs and glass structures for art collections: art and art history are here on display.

Featured throughout the exhibition is a black and white photograph Meckseper took of the Niedersachsenstein monument built by the Expressionist artist Bernhard Hoetger in her hometown, the early 20th century artist colony, Worpswede. The imposing sculpture was intended as a tribute to the fallen soldiers of World War I, just as Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column” was to the Romanian war victims. The Nazi party, however, declared Hoetger’s Expressionist art “degenerate” in 1936, and the Niedersachsenstein is the only surviving large scale Expressionist outdoor sculpture in Germany.

Concrete and bronze casts of mannequin parts evoking Brancusi’s “Male Torso” are paired with appropriated elements like boxes of male underwear label 2(X)ist. In addition, large-scale wall bound works on mirror as well as enlarged sketches and collage bare traces of early 20th century Expressionism. Their formal appearance of window shapes bring to mind Max Beckmann’s paintings from his exile years in the United States in the late forties, which often depicted window tableaus.

Meckseper’s confrontation of contemporary consumer display vitrine structures with the historic underpinnings of Hoetger's, Brancusi's and Mies van der Rohe's work, illustrates how early Modernism, German Expressionism and the avant-garde developed into a form of political and aesthetic resistance to the mainstream. In Meckseper’s work, the full complexity and contradictions of how contemporary life, art, commerce and politics intertwine are addressed and embodied; the gallery space becoming a site of inquiry into hidden ideologies and power systems.

Josephine Meckseper was born in Lilienthal, Germany, and studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and CalArts, Los Angeles, where she received her MFA. Meckseper is currently preparing for a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Germany, in 2014. Most recently, her work was exhibited throughout the permanent collection and public spaces of Parrish Art Museum during their first summer season in their new Herzog & De Meuron building. Meckseper’s first public project in New York, Manhattan Oil Project, was commissioned by Art Production Fund and installed in a lot adjacent to Times Square in 2012. A major retrospective was organized by the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, in 2007. Meckseper’s work has been exhibited worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and the Hammer Museum, UCLA. The artist lives and works in New York.

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Matt Connors, John Henderson, Lucas Knipscher
Gallery 2

Andrea Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce a three-person exhibition in our Gallery 2 space with work by Matt Connors, John Henderson and Lucas Knipscher. Using very different strategies, each of these artists consciously engages the tropes of modernist abstraction in ways that both acknowledge the familiarity of these gestures and renew and challenge the material conventions of their mediums. In objects that navigate and test the assumed boundaries of painting, sculpture, and photography, the three artists actively register the evolving potential of these media, suggesting an open and performative relationship to the history of abstraction and all of its loaded meanings.

Rejecting, perhaps, the serial obsolescence of commodity, the artists’ subtle gestures explore the limits of material, support, surface, and structure, finding continuation in our most traditional art practices. In a context defined by the increasing saturation of images, the three artists here make a case for the unique position that real objects can hold in the physical space of a viewer.

Matt Connors (b. 1973) received his MFA from Yale in 2006. Major solo and two-person exhibitions of his work have been presented at MoMA PS1, New York; Kunstahlle Düsseldorf, Germany; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; CANADA Gallery, New York; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; and The Breeder, Athens, Greece. Group exhibitions include those at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; Kunsthalle Andratx, Mallorca, Spain; Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium, and Sikkema Jenkins, New York. He was the receipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship Grant.

John Henderson (b. 1984) received his MFA in painting from Northwestern University in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include Peep-Hole, Milan, Italy; Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong; T293, Naples, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Golden Gallery, Chicago. His work was featured in the Prague Biennale 6 and group exhibitions at Depart Foundation, Rome; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; Museo d’Art Moderna di Bologna, Italy; and Family Business Gallery, New York.

Lucas Knipscher (b. 1979) received his MFA in photography from Bard College in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include Vilma Gold, London and Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles; his work has been included in group exhibitions at Swiss Institute, New York; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; the Sculpture Center, New York; and Balice Hertling, Paris.

This exhibition has been organized by Cory Nomura.

Also on View: Alina Szapocznikow and Hannah Wilke.

Image: Josephine Meckseper, Title to be determined, 2013. Acrylic on wood, acrylic on plexi, and pigment print on anodized aluminum in stainless steel and glass vitrine (247.65 x 121.92 x 121.92 cm)

For media inquiries contact:
Lance Brewer at l.brewer@rosengallery.com or Jen Joy at jen@jenjoycommunications.com

Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 W 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

Gallery 2
544 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011

Open Hours
Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

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