Pyromaniac 2. 2003. c-print. 101 x 76 cm

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Untitled (Berlin Demonstration, Fire, Cops). 2002. c-print. 76 x 101 cm

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Blow Up (Tamara, Body). 2007. C-Print.  200 x 160 cm.
Courtesy Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart and Arndt & Partner, Berlin/ Zürich

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Blow-Up (Michelli, Knee-Highs). 2006. c-print. 199.9 x 159.8 cm / Blow-Up (Tamara, Portrait). 2006. c-print. 199.9 x 159.8 cm
Courtesy Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart; Arndt & Partner, Berlin/Zurich; Elizabeth Dee, New York.

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JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER is known for her sculptures and mixed-media installations, photographs (presented above) and video exploring the glamour of consumer fashion and adverstising from a radical point of view located inside the world that she is displaying.

Often using department store display cases and sales ephemera, she conceives the art gallery as boutique: a cultural arena where aesthetics merge with ideologies, politics, and lifestyle axioms, levelling all as capitalist bi-product. She adapts the strategies of hard-sell to promote the diaspora of American culture and its (dis)contents as enviable status symbols.

Her photographs subtly infuse lifestyle ideals with an incitement to revolutionary violence. Using the format of fashion magazines, JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER examines how cultural information and its inherent values are packaged and merchandised: beauty, capitalism, and glamour are laid bare and magnified as vacuous imagery transparently revealing their social, political, and economic realities. In Pyromaniac 2, the is posed with lit match perched between her lips, an emblem of commodified desire transformed to an impending powder keg explosion.

If you want to know more about New York based artist JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER, I suggest you a good summary at http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk